I feel like a complete geek in posting this, but for the benefit of anyone who wants to improve their use of commas, here's a great online guide by the late Larry Trask:

http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/doc/punctuation/node00.html

Quote from CSU1 :

comma's

Dunno about the Germans, but the Irish use too many " ' "!

It's people that use too many LOL's that really get on my nerves.

Quote from al heeley :

It's people that use too many LOL's that really get on my nerves.

I like it. "LOL" is a perfect "disregard this, I have no clue"-indicator. It saves you time because you can skip posts immediately so you can concentrate on the useful ones.

Vain

Quote from tristancliffe :

semo-colons

I haven't been all pedantic about your posts in ages, so I thought I'd single this word out. I quite like it actually, as far as fake words go - it conjures images of people doing punctuation with flags.

What really puzzles me about Germans and language.. is their infinite use of capitals in sentences.
Doesn't this just take away the point of capitals? Normal languages use capitals to show that the given word is a name or the start of a sentence.
Using it 7 times in a sentence is just beyond me. :rolleyes:

We use capitals to show it's a noun or the beginning of a sentence... Not really that much harder, is it (if you know which words are nouns, that is)?

I'm in a firm right now for school, have to work their two weeks. The thing what annoys me the most, (look, two commas!) is the comma and point in the numbers. At school we have to use the BIN-norm, that means there are spaces between thousands and a comma before the decimals. Now at work, everything has to be WITH a point between thousands and a point between decimals.

And at school they all go like: you have to put the date like this: yyyy/mm/dd
At work they use the English norm, so that means: mm/dd/yyyy

It's really annoying, especially if you think about all the tests you get for you to learn this stuff, but in real life people don't use it.

Quote from bbman :

We use capitals to show it's a noun or the beginning of a sentence... Not really that much harder, is it (if you know which words are nouns, that is)?

It's not hard at all, I had no trouble writing sentences in German lessons at school. But the sentences just look messy and it's hard to distinct names from nouns, since they just all have capitals.

And in other languages it's difficult to distinct some gerunds from verbs, because they are both not capitalized.
Names tend to be a lot more unique than gerunds, which are often identical with some forms of the verb. So I think capitalizing all nouns is the better trade-off.
However, such comparisons of structures don't work, because the use of the language is formed around the structure. So if you think a foreign language has a certain drawback you're just not using it right.

Vain

Since I read and write a lot in english, my german is now really crapy and I forget to place capitals. Others think now I'm stupid

To the many commas. When I read English books or articles I see many commas there and I would say that there as many as in German. It's more a thing how people use them in daily live and how it should be, concerning the English grammar.