German is such a good language for poetry, IMO. I know many people have some sort of prejudice that German is best at barking orders at people with, but to me it's quite a poetic and cultivated language, the rhythm, the way the words look, the feelings the words evoke. It can just sound so damned polite, educated and intelligent. (Unlike Danish, its ugly cousin to the north.) I guess I'm just old fashioned because Germany was quite popular in Denmark before WW2 - if you were educated, you liked German culture and spoke/knew the language. So yes, go ahead and learn it! :D It's not that difficult, it's actually a very organised language, grammatically speaking. My parents who both taught German at school claim it only gets easier the further you go along. And actually the main reason I like Rammstein is because of the lyrics, there are at least two instances where they're paraphrasing Goethe: "Dalai Lama" off Reise Reise is a retelling of "Der Erlkönig", set in an airplane instead of a horse-ride through a forest, and the opening line of "Rosenrot" is basically the beginning of "Heidenröslein", just with the genders switched. ("Sah ein Mädchen ein Röslein stehen" vs. "Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehen")
Heh, yeah! German is certainly a glorious language to thunder and declaim in, and I love that about it (it suits industrial-metal and ebm SO well...) but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, poetic and graceful too. And I love the way that the same word in German often seems to cover a concept that would be split into several different words in English - it makes German sound, to my ears, more nuanced, as though it can imply a lot of different things with a few words where English would have to explain itself at length. While the huge and very specific vocabulary we have in English is great most of the time, it oddly means that we sometimes suck at implying more than one meaning at once or discussing really big, primal concepts and ideas. German doesn't seem to have that problem so much... ^_^
I guess I'm just old fashioned because Germany was quite popular in Denmark before WW2 - if you were educated, you liked German culture and spoke/knew the language.
So yes, go ahead and learn it! :D It's not that difficult, it's actually a very organised language, grammatically speaking. My parents who both taught German at school claim it only gets easier the further you go along.
And actually the main reason I like Rammstein is because of the lyrics, there are at least two instances where they're paraphrasing Goethe: "Dalai Lama" off Reise Reise is a retelling of "Der Erlkönig", set in an airplane instead of a horse-ride through a forest, and the opening line of "Rosenrot" is basically the beginning of "Heidenröslein", just with the genders switched. ("Sah ein Mädchen ein Röslein stehen" vs. "Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehen")
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