Data here, for whatever it's worth, on the frequency with which the word schadenfreude is used. The New York Times has the benefit of being searchable back to 1851, and has has used this word 214 times. Here is the data by year, showing when usage became more frequent. To save space, I group some of the years by half-decade, with yearly breakdowns following in brackets.

Pre-1960 — 8 usages (one each in 1898, 1900, 1902, 1918, 1936, 1944, 1949 and 1954)
1961-65 — 3 [0, 2, 0, 0, 1]
1966-70 — 3 [0, 0, 1, 2, 0]
1971-75 — 6 [1, 3, 2, 0, 0]
1976-80 — 3 [1, 0, 0, 1, 1]
1981-85 — 5 [2, 0, 0, 2, 1]
1986-90 — 15 [4, 2, 2, 4, 3]
…… 1991 — 4
…… 1992 — 8
…… 1993 — 4
…… 1994 — 2
…… 1995 — 7
…… 1996 — 7
…… 1997 — 5
…… 1998 — 10
…… 1999 — 11
…… 2000 — 24
…… 2001 — 14
…… 2002 — 24
…… 2003 — 29
…… 2004 — 22 to date (3 in the last six days)

The OED 1st edition, supplement, gives four citations, all from the 1920s.

Yes, jheem, and OED no doubt has many more its records. I think someone noted a while back that it had one much earlier, in the mid-1800s. My point was to try to get some handle on how and when the word became more and more frequently used in our language. Without regard to the issue of when it had progressed enough to be considered 'an English word'.

Obviously the New York Times isn't a perfect way to track year by year progress. Unfortunately, I can't think of any better way.

Interestingly, I have been discussing 'Schadenfreude' with my logophile friend (who, BTW, pronounces it correctly!), and he searched for it in the online German Dictionary. I was surprised to find that one of the words they defined it with was 'epicaricacy.' Here is the link.

I was surprised to find that one of the words they defined it with was 'epicaricacy.'

Well, that settles it. Epicaricacy is a word, cuz it's in a dictionary that I use. Note the other English glosses are: gloating, malicious joy, mischievousness, and spitefulness. Also, if you click the P icon to the right of Schadenfreude, you can hear it pronounced.

Note the other English glosses are: gloating, malicious joy, mischievousness, and spitefulness.

Yes, as a matter of fact, my logophile friend says that he uses it to mean something as mild
as the mischievousness of a child, not necessarily enjoyment of someone else's misfortune. He wondered if anyone here has the huge Muret-Sanders German dictionary to see what it says.

I must say, I would never used "schadenfreude" to mean something that benign.

Also, if you click the P icon to the right of Schadenfreude, you can hear it pronounced.

Yes, I did. I wish I would have done that a long time ago! What is the "die?" They pronounce it with "die." One wouldn't normally, right?

I tried to bring up the proununciation of "epicaricacy" there, but they refer you to the online Webster's site, and of course it isn't in Webster's.

Bob, if I were writing a sentence using "schadenfreude" in German, would I use the "die" (Or "der")? Would it be capitalized? It seems that I remember it would be captalized in German. If so, why?

If so, why?

You'd use "die Schadenfreude" if you were talking about "the epicaricacy", but "eine Schadenfreude" if you were talking about "an epicaricacy". As BobH just said above, German (like Latin, Russian, Classical Greek, and even Old English) is inflected for case. The paradigm for Schadenfreude is:

Nominative die Schadenfreude
Accusative die Schadenfreude
Dative der Schadenfreude
Genitive der Schadenfreude

A quick check at canoo.net (a German grammar site) shows me that there is no plural for this noun. Nominative is used when the noun is the subject of a sentence, accusative when it's the direct object and some prepositions that govern the accusative, dative usually for indirect object and some prepositions that govern the dative, and genitive for the possessive.

About capitalizing nouns in German. It's something that's recent, probably within the last 300 or so, and there was a movement in the mid to late 19th century to abolish. Never caught on. Sort of like their latest spelling reform. All nouns and some personal pronouns (e.g., Du / Ihr, Sie (Ihr) (thou / ye, you (formal) (your), but not ich 'I'.

I nearly left my German classes when I discovered that they have, theoretically (though some spellings are duplicated) sixteen words for "the".

In English we cope very well with just the one.

In English we cope very well with just the one.

While in Russian and Latin, they have no word for the. And in English, we have at least eight forms of the verb to be, while in Mandarin Chinese, they have one. Meaning?

A quick check at canoo.net (a German grammar site) shows me that there is no plural for this noun.

I think I remember the answer to this from a previous discussion, but I am correct that there is no adjective form of "Schadenfreude"? That's too bad because it most likely would be descriptively used. For example, the incident that started this whole rehashed subject was when my daughter called me "Schadenfreude-like" (for laughing at the woman who fell, trying to be sexy.)

jheem, I am sitting here trying to think of the 8 forms of to be. Can you help me out?

jheem or Bob, do you think that German is a harder language to learn than English is? I would think the pronunciations in English would be a killer (like the "ph" and silent "g" and "n" and "k," etc.)

Schadenfreude-like" (for laughing at the woman who fell, trying to be sexy.)

May be schadenfreudig? There is an adjectival form freudig 'joyous'.

I am sitting here trying to think of the 8 forms of to be. Can you help me out?

The ones I was thinking of are: am, are, is, was, were, be, been, and being. YMMV.

do you think that German is a harder language to learn than English is? I would think the pronunciations in English would be a killer (like the "ph" and silent "g" and "n" and "k," etc.)

Well, questions like this don't really have an answer. German spelling is much easier to learn than English. Soundwise, German has a slight advance on difficulty with the front rounded vowels (like /ö/ and /ü/), but English has /r/ which is a rather rare and difficult sound. Grammarwise, it's a toss-up: while it's true that German has three genders (with no lexical clue as in Spanish or Italian -o/-a) and four cases, and more verbal forms, English has a very complicated system or periphrastic verb forms that drive ESL/EFL students bonkers. Hope that helps. Linguistically conceptwise, people whose first language is not Indo-European (e.g., Bantu, Chinese, Japanese, Lakota) may have a more difficult learning either English or German than say an Englishman or a Pole.

quote:

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Originally posted by Kalleh:

jheem, I am sitting here trying to think of the 8 forms of _to be_. Can you help me out?

jheem or Bob, do you think that German is a harder language to learn than English is? I would think the pronunciations in English would be a killer (like the "ph" and silent "g" and "n" and "k," etc.)

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Off the top of my head, in the present tense, we have am, are, is, am being, are being, is being but I can't think of any more without shifting tenses.

As for whether German is harder to learn than English I'm not sure that it's an answerable question. It has its easy points (you can more or less spell any word upon hearing it, compound nouns make new coinages simple, you can always spot the nouns in an unfamiliar text by the capital letters) and its hard - for us anyway - points (genders, cases and such like). On the whole though the languages have similar roots and are I suppose about equal in difficulty. It's not like learning Arabic or Japanese where everything is different.

Snap !

Quote "...jheem or Bob, do you think that German is a harder language to learn than English is?..."

Although I am neither one of those cited, I would like to comment.

My own view is that English is a very easy language to learn to communicate adequately in; it is, though, a very difficult language to speak really well.

English is a very easy language to learn to communicate adequately in; it is, though, a very difficult language to speak really well.

I'd say that this holds true for most any language. If both parties wish to communicate, the subtlelies of grammar, phonology. and suchlike are defenstrated.

But English is, I suggest, easier than most.

After all, we have no genders; our verbs barely decline; advectives don't usually need to agree with anything; our articles rarely change (and we don't much care whether or not we use them anyway.

The one admitted difficulty of the language, our eccentric spelling, matters not one jot in the case of vocal communication - which is the most common communication that people indulge in when they meet others.

Of course, the dramatic rise in the popularity of written communication, as driven by the internet, may well change this, essential simplicity, of English.

quote:

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Originally posted by Richard English:

The one admitted difficulty of the language, our eccentric spelling

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As an English teacher I'd have to disagree. There are many areas that give foreign students a great deal of difficulty. One such is the enormous number of phrasal verbs that modify the meaning of the main verb beyond recognition.
Consider

take, take on (accept responsibility), take off (fly away/remove clothing/imitate/cancel) , take up (begin anew practice), take down (remove from an exalted position), take over (become the new owner of), overtake (surpass), take under (carry beneath), undertake (agree to do - but an undertaker is something else again), take in (give shelter to/ deceive), take out (kill/ask on a date), take part (happen), take part in (join in), take apart (disassemble), take away (remove), takeaway (noun only for an eat-out restaurant), take back (return/retract), take aback (bewilder), take after (resemble), take for (mistake for someone else), take care (beware). take care off (look after), take through (explain)...

and that's off the top of my head in just under two minutes.

Another area of difficulty is the fact that our present tenses rarely refer to the time of an action as we reply on time markers to modify the tense.

"I'm going to Portugal." doesn't necessarily mean now, it might mean next week, as indeed might "I go to Portugal" although there are shades of meaning that separate the two. In fact "I will go to Portugal", "I shall go to Portugal" and "I'll be going to Portugal" all express further shades of meaning and intention about the future.

We can also tell a story in the past using the present tense. (So, Beckham is running down the wing when all of a sudden a dog runs out onto the pitch. He doesn't see the dog until it's too late and he goes arse over tit while the dog runs away with the ball.)

Our use of the passive voice is found to be confusing by many students.
Our massive vocabulary where we have at least two or three different words for just about anything may give us the most expressive language but it doesn't help the new student who wants to know why null means the same as void and where the heck null and void fits in.

In short there are many complexities that exist in English that cause non-natives a headache. We, as native speakers never even consider them but then again the average German never gives a second's consideration to the use of genders and cases. he just says it and it's right.

Quote "...In short there are many complexities that exist in English that cause non-natives a headache..."

I agree 100% - which is why it is rare indeed for even the most accomplished English speaker to speak English properly. Our idiomatic expressions and the casual way in which we treat some of our tenses mean that it takes a long time for a student to grasp the subtelties of English.

But to get by in, which is what I was suggesting, it's a relatively easy language and I doubt you'd need more than maybe 1000 words (most of which will retain their form in all uses) to communicate quite well.

Indeed, when I eavesdrop on conversations in the pub I suspect that there are many who get by on ever fewer!

I stand by my earlier estimate. 1000 words vocabulary (or Ogden's 800 of Basic English) is enough in any language "to get by". In German, you can drop gender, number, and case easily with no loss of information. Same with tenses. One needs no more than the present (and some convenient adverbs of time). These simplified languages are called pidgins and when they grow up a little and have native speakers they're usually called creoles. Ease is relative like most things. People say that the grammar of English or Chinese is simple because there's few inflections, but the nuances of periphrasis are overlooked by native speakers. A complete and rigorous syntax of English has never been written. That goes for other languages, too. Most people have all sorts of notions about language which are usually incomplete or wrong.

Wow, I almost forgot I asked this question! How interesting, jheem, Bob and Richard. I think, too, there might be a cultural implication, though I don't have enough experience to know. I just remember when I was in Italy, most people were fine with me trying to communicate very roughly, with my English/Italian Dictionary and my knowledge of Spanish. I have heard (from some Europeans whom I met there) that it isn't nearly as easy in some countries...France, for example. I also think any language that doesn't have our letters, such as Chinese, would be harder to learn just for psychological reasons.