Ich werde high.

English Translation

I’m getting high.

It’s always weird coming across English loanwords randomly in German sentences.

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I wonder if Germans get a similar weird feeling from seeing German words like Schadenfreude or Doppelganger get thrown around in English.

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If much less frequent in English.
I actually like it.
Nothing is more fun than a Texan with a heavy drawl saying “Wenn schon denn schon” or “Dienst is Dienst and Schnaps is Schnaps”.

People have always been using missing (or simply better) expressions from other languages.
Is more problematic when words are misused, like the famous “Handy” in German.

And I would appreciate “Doppelgänger” but I know it is a lot to ask.
When long years ago, Kanzler Schröder was replaced by Merkel, USA Today ran the headline “Thank heavens. No Umlaut anymore”.

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I’ve been noticing that if I try to generate other sentences to practice, they often use “ieren” (like “funktionieren”) loan verbs from English, rather than the German.verb I was hoping to practice. It feels a little like ‘fake’ German, but it’s easier than learning a verb I won’t see again for a while.

You are right that there are a lot of English loan words in German (“Denglish”) but “funktionieren” is not a good example.
It stems from Latin “fungor” or “functio”, probably even older (old Indo-european), and it is therefore found in almost every European language.
The same is true of “stationieren, delegieren, partizipieren, generieren, räsonieren, deklarieren …”; similar to English, not from English but just having the same roots.

Be happy that it makes learning easier!

It is the reason why I am learning Italian from English and not from German.
English has mixed Germanic and Romanic roots, often words exist in parallel, like the famous table/stable examples “beef/steer”, “veal/calf” and “pork/swine”, so the “vocabulary overlap” is much, much bigger.
But is doesn’t mean that the Italians took all their words from English :wink:

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Excellent correction of my assumption. Thank you.
However, it makes it difficult to learn the other verbs that mean the same thing when the English-y ones are so easy! Sometimes I feel like a birder with a checklist, waiting for a sighting of that ‘rare’ verb.

That’s true and sometimes I use the “search option” with “a change of cloze” to have more examples of memorable words in my personal collection.

But mostly I am content - for the time being - with having a broader passive vocabulary with alternatives I understand and and a smaller active one with words I can intuitively use, knowing well that my expression is therefore less nuanced.

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