Abstract

Impersonal, detached; difficult to understand; theoretical; insufficiently factual; no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content.

Objective: expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.

To be scientific, academic, scholarly in the German context means to be objective and abstract. Objectivity, in turn, means to be unbiased, free of value judgement. Germans do their best to avoid communicating their personal opinion. They address the subject matter as an objective neutral. If it all, personal opinion is communicated at the conclusion and as discreetly as possible.

German school textbooks rarely explain their content via concrete examples. The focus is on principles which are explained only sparingly in case studies. Mathematical formulas and abstract statements are preferred.

This is also the case when German learn foreign languages. They first learn the grammar, then apply those rules to writing and finally to speaking.