The Als and Wie Chat

There are probably 10,000 issues that I have with the German language. In my humble opinion, it's like you stuffed sixty Einstein-like folks into a room and asked them to develop the most complicated language possible, and they did their very best to accomplish that goal.

This week, I came to the words in German which really translate over to mean "as".  There are actually two 'as' words that can be used.

1.  Als. 
2.  Wie

They both mean the same thing.....'as'.

But there are two rules in using the words.  Typically, you would use wie in making a comparison of things when the two things look pretty equal....like one building being only inches taller than another building. Typically, you would use als in making a comparison of things where they don't look equal....like one building is eight feet taller than the other building.

Naturally, this brings on debate because you might use wie to suggest that two cars are fairly similar in nature, and the German guy quickly corrects you because the cars are vastly different (in his humble opinion) and you should USE the word als instead.  Silly?  Well....Germans start arguments about things like this, and even the proper words to associate with a comparison.

Why not just have ONE single word to use in the position of 'as'?  That's a curious thing.  You might go back in time to 4,000 years ago and two German hunters were out on some wild boar hunt with spears, and they likely got into a chat about previous boar hunts.  At some point, they decided that you needed a special key-word to let folks know that one boar hunt was extra special (requiring the word als) and that another key-word would be used for regular boar hunts (wie).  It could be just that simple on how the two words got invented and no one ever stepped up to just suggest using one single word.

All of this brings me to the topic that Germans seem to spend a lot of time thinking about things.  It seems logical to them that there has to be a special word for each single situation and the dividing line must exist between als and wie.