Summary
Elon Musk sparked outrage in Germany by endorsing the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on his platform, X, claiming “only the AfD can save Germany.”
The AfD, which polls second ahead of Germany’s February snap election, has been labeled extremist by German intelligence.
Political leaders accused Musk of election interference, while others criticized his remarks as harmful. Musk later doubled down, calling for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s resignation.
Musk’s comments align with his past support for far-right and anti-immigration figures across Europe and beyond.
I’m not a native English speaker, thank you!
Don’t listen to them, your statement was fine, your English is good, and I think what you wrote is better than their edit.
I think they’re trying to be funny by implying that he doesn’t know shit about anything, rather than just Germany, but it’s not a well crafted joke if that was the intention.
Oh i knew that, my reply was purely ironically :)
Yeah this doesn’t feel like the place for that kind of joke plus “you know shit” reads as “you know a lot of things” to my native speaking brain as well as the other meanings and it’s very hard to tell intent from text.
Wooosh
Their advice is kind of bad… “you know shit” implies that he’s intelligent and knows things. Especially if just written down. If speaking, you may be able to convey what you want with tone and context, but even still…
Despite it being technically incorrect, grammatically, what you meant to say was, “you don’t know shit.” E.g., “You don’t know shit about Germany” = “You know nothing about Germany.”
English is fucking weird, and I can’t imagine learning all of these rules. Frankly, I couldn’t even explain to you how I know 3/4 of them, it’s just innate at this point.
Mm but we’re also very contextual- the ‘shut the fuck up’ implies the negative. So a native speaker automatically fills in the missing ‘all’ after shit or ‘don’t’ before know depending on regional preference
Yeah, I definitely read it the correct way, but I can see how someone who isn’t a native speaker could be confused by the wording. “You know shit” just sounds weird, especially after such a negative prior sentence.
Fun part is that only really applies in the written format - spoken it would have been incredibly clear!
(Enflish isn’t an inflection language my arse} )
Not even knowing shit = not even knowing the least (most worthless) amount possible = knowing nothing?
All languages are weird. English has very little in the way of inflection, which makes it fairly easy to pick up (in my opinion). For example, it only has one word each for “the” and “a(n)” whereas German has “der/die/das, des/der/des, dem/der/dem, den/die/das, die, der, den, die” and “ein/eine/ein, eines/einer/eines, einem/einer/einem, einen/eine/ein”. Yes, lots of duplicates, but each instance has its own distinct grammatical function, and its much the same with adjectives and nouns, and it all has to line up; “green” is different depending on the grammatical gender and number and noun case of whatever it is that is green… for example.
I think at some point you’re pretty much done actively learning rules unless you’re a proofreader, teacher, editor, translator, writer, philologist… you ’ll just have to move on to immersing yourself in English, whether it’s in person or via song lyrics, movies, books, forums, articles, documentation, video games. That way you’ll pick up idiomatic expressions like this one and ideally develop something like an informed sense for what sounds right (for example: “I could care less” doesn’t make much sense, and “irregardless” is a pointless double negative).