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Re: future tech - OFF TOPIC
Hi Yuval,
nice story :-)
The truth is that most study-books in Germany are WRITTEN by Germans
(and not translated from english). Donät forget that Germany has a very
long history of education, unlike Israel. Besides that indeed the Linux
users in Germany are much more plenty than in Israel and there is a big
demand and market for German-language documentation, especially for
ISDN.
Schlomo
PS: KNowing German is never a mistake :-)
Yuval El-Hanany wrote:
>
> Ira Abramov wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 19 Apr 1998, Miki Shapiro wrote:
> >
> > well said Miki, thanks for trying to help out :-) but I have a nagging
> > feeling we haven't heard the last of it yet...
> >
> > > by the way, all ISDN development for linux is in germany for some reason
> > > and the S.U.S.E distro handles it best. do they give out ISDN for free
> > > in germany or something?
> >
> > some of the first/cheapest/best cards for PCs came from German companies
> > like TELES, and the German phone network was one of the first to make ISDN
> > cheap and usable for the public in Europe, that sums it up. the fact this
> > is so painfully evident (nobody complains about SCSI driver and kernel
> > work being almost entirely developped in the Silicon Valley) is that
> > germans have this proudness virus about their language and culture, and
> > will be very adamant about language in FAQs, sources and docs. very stupid
> > if you ask me, in these days of globally distributed Open sources. I have
> > twice posted questions in English to their mailing list in the past (when
> > I was trying to test linux with equipment from citicom) and got answers in
> > Deutsch. Sheisheads, what can I say?
> >
>
> I shouldn't feel like having to defend the Germans, but Israelis have a tendency
>
> to feel slighted by Germans which very often stems from different cultures. So
> here goes, after quite a few visits to Germany, and discussions with quite a
> few Germans, it appears that unlike the Hebrew speaking community, the
> German community is quite a bit larger. Even in Universities they use German
> books (many translated from English). I once thought of buying 3rd year Physics
> book (which doubles for MSc as well) in Germany in a university town and to my
> surprise they only keep it in German (and this is probably not a high volume
> book).
> Anyhow, the bottomline is that they really don't speak English that well even
> many
> of the university graduates. This is not so much because of proudness but
> because
> they don't have the need. I reckon, if Israelis had all their books in Hebrew as
> well
> as movies, we probably would have had some pretty lousy English. However unlike
> the infamous French, they're usually mostly helpful when approached in English
> even if in somewhat broken German-English.
>
> P.S.
> I can also testify that they're pretty good medics after a motorcycle fall
> I've had in
> Australia in some remote area where after 2 hours of drying in the sun some 4
> Germans appeared who did not speak English but were perfectly good at bandaging.
>
> Ofcourse, they did joke among themselves that they should charge me but they
> didn't
> know I've understood. Ever since I've got some softspot for non English speaking
>
> Germans...
>
> Yuval