I’m an American immigrant married to a German, and it definitely took us a bit to adjust to each other’s feedback styles- he thought every dish he made was my new absolute favorite, and I thought he disliked my cooking at first, because I’d say something was delicious and he’d say it was fine, lol.

But I’ll take it, because this way Germans think I’m quick witted when I respond with that.

Long sleeves and long underwear/leggings, two pairs of socks, flannel-lined jeans if you have them, sweatpants and jeans on top if not, flannel or similar overshirt, scarf(!), sweater/sweatshirt, winter coat (or 2 additional sweaters/sweatshirts and a raincoat or other large windbreaker), boots, gloves, mittens, and hat.

You won’t die, especially if you move around. I’ve had to take the coat off while shoveling in those temperatures, though my feet and hands were unhappy after a while. Definitely have a cup of hot liquid when you get back inside though.

New Englanders say that too! We also respond to others concerned about our wellbeing in the rain: “I’m not made of sugar,” though we have an answer that Germans don’t say: “but you are pretty sweet.”

I can’t tell if it’s anti passive-aggression or ultra passive-aggressive, but it works, lol.

I’m also autistic and I discovered (accidentally, when I reacted earnestly once) that if you say “I’m sorry you think that, do you want to talk about your self image?,” it ends the conversation without ending the relationship (useful for colleagues or similar).

I would be conflicted about a child with infantile tay-Sachs (there are probably other similar diseases, but I don’t know them). That’s a short, excruciating life, and I would not want to live it. But the idea of someone choosing euthanasia for someone else, even someone under their care, is pretty abhorrent to me. It seems too ripe for abuse, and the right to decide to end your own life should not be transferable. The ending of it can be, but only under circumstances determined by the person (so I could tell my husband that I don’t want to keep going if I can’t recognize my children, for example, and when I reach that point, he could kill me, but he can’t decide what the line is).

In the 1971 case of Arkell v Pressdram,[76] Arkell’s lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: “His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.” Private Eye responded: “We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.”[77] The plaintiff withdrew the threatened lawsuit.[78] The magazine has since used this exchange as a euphemism for a blunt and coarse dismissal, i.e.: “We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram”.[79][80] As with “tired and emotional” this usage has spread beyond the magazine.

For context, from the Wikipedia for private eye magazine

My foot’s a fucking leg end

That’s several orders of magnitude worse, fuck. Soon they’ll probably close the loop and consider owning a smartphone to be evidence that things aren’t so bad for you, and you don’t need asylum.

They use similar alphabets and have a lot of vocabulary in common, so many Arabic speakers find it pretty easy to learn, ime, though that doesn’t work the other way.

There is a greater linguistic distance between English and Arabic than between Farsi and Arabic, even though Farsi and English have a shorter linguistic distance between themselves than either does with Arabic.

Similarly, Finns probably have an easier time learning Swedish than they do Spanish even though Swedish and Finnish are from different language families, just because a lot of vocabulary will be similar. Estonian would probably be even easier for Finnish speakers because of common vocabulary and a shared language family.

Tenses are one of the more difficult aspects of English, as I noted, yes. Luckily, English allows for asimplification in most cases. English seems easy to me because I’m a language instructor (not teaching English) working with students from all over the world and they almost always rate English as pretty easy compared to other languages they’ve learned. One of my current students is a native Arabic speaker who found English easier than Persian in spite of the increased linguistic distance, for example.

The German and Spanish Wikipedias both also include pages for characteristic tenses and modes, respectively (the reason the English page for that case is split is because it’s got a different name in English). Every language has complex aspects, but one does not need to learn how to properly distinguish between “I would have been going” and “I would have gone” to speak English at a B2 level.

I’m sorry you’re not confident in your English, it’s great. Perhaps you haven’t mastered the tenses (many native speakers also have difficulty with them), but you are perfectly competent at communicating in English.

There’s a few I’ve spoken to in the German speaking communities, but they live in Germany, so idk that that’s relevant to you.

I’m also autistic and also don’t really feel anger. I feel disappointed and/or frustrated with how people act, and I can feel a complete lack of goodwill towards people (not my baseline, I generally want to help people if I can). There are certainly people who deserve negative consequences for their actions and I don’t feel any compassion for Assad, for example. I probably wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire, but I don’t feel angry with him (I might if I were Syrian and/or had more experience with the effects of his actions).

In my personal life, I don’t have any exes that I’m angry with (and I have some awful exes), it’s either confused, afraid of, pitying, neutral or positive.

Though tbh, I’m not sure if I just don’t recognize anger but do feel it. A coworker was sketchy about a tip we should have shared the other day, and I felt that it was wrong she pretended she hadn’t gotten a tip, and sad for her that she’d be deceptive about €0,65, but I wasn’t angry.

I do feel spiteful sometimes, which has got to be similar, but the only way I really express that is being extra polite to someone who’s being a dick so they feel guilty. It feels to me like I do that because I want them to be less rude in the future and I want to help induce the natural consequence of guilt that comes along with rudeness, but that could also just be my rationalizing it.

It’s actually a syllabic L, which is often spelled out as a schwa in pronunciation dictionaries.

If you speak German, an equivalent would be the -en on most unconjugated verbs. Haben is pronounced with a syllabic n (or m, depending on your accent), for example.

The difference is basically in length. A syllabic consonant is shorter than even a short vowel sound, and which vowel it uses depends on the language. It’s a schwa in English because that’s basically our default vowel, as you pointed out, but not every language uses a schwa as the syllabic consonant carrier: Serbo-Croatian uses [u].

There were already multiple patterns for words ending in “er” (both the doer words, like runner, and a series of words like butter, feather, sister), so it could be a conflation, but I think it’s more likely that it’s just a simplification. British has “er” and “re” endings for meter, depending on whether it’s a verb or a noun, and Americans just spell both “er” for simplicity’s sake.

If English were one of the hardest languages to learn, it would not be the most common second language worldwide. It is a difficult language to master, but we barely conjugate verbs, have only remnants of a case system, and no grammatical gender.

The hardest parts about English are the spelling and the advanced weird cases, like “I will have done that by tonight,” but those are not things that the standard language learner has to care about. It’s perfectly fine to ignore all the rules that don’t inhibit communication, so no ESL speaker needs to learn about not splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions (unless they want to do academic writing in the arts, I guess).

Then maybe she was trolling back?

I think either way, you dodged a bullet. You don’t have food poisoning or a girlfriend who lies to you, lol.

Pro tip: you’re better off not dating someone who gets rid of their fridge every winter unless you live at mcmurdo. I could see very thoroughly cleaning and unplugging a freezer if you have a lot of space outside (protected from any wildlife) and can rely on it being well under freezing for months, but it’s probably either too cold to work as a fridge or temps will spike to dangerously warm during the day.

What for? There’s no reason to try and force anyone to do anything. It’s all completely pointless because whatever you get out of them will be gone the next day. Plus, how do they collect the people every day? Unless you surprise them every morning somehow, I think most people would just say no, even upon pain of death (potentially suicide) after the first few torture sessions, especially if you know that people have died and they still come back the next day.

You can make plans for the beginning of the day, but you can’t intentionally wake up earlier than you did the first time, so raids or similar tactics are unlikely to work unless you’re targeting someone who originally slept until noon.