In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear the glottal stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. There’s a reason why it’s in the IPA. It’s also e.g. the basis for the “gender not-really-neutral” dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).

My fish bowl in a fishbowl.

Pink Floyd:

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls swimming in
a fishbowl, year after year
Running over the same old ground, what have we found?
The same old fears, wish you were here

What would you call this?

Wikipedia explains “the rules.”

Orthography: open, hyphenated, or solid (closed up)

English uses many open compound nouns, a large subclass of which, by convention in accepted English orthography, are not closed up (not solidified) and are sometimes optionally hyphenated in attributive position (that is, when functioning as a noun adjunct). Examples are high school, kidney disease, and file format. Although some other languages would close up these nouns’ components (for example, German usually does so), English has a tendency whereby it closes up only certain ones, usually only ones in which the head noun is monosyllabic (and even within that category, only sometimes, and in a way that is not fully standardized). For example, data set and dataset, or file name and filename, are accepted alternative forms, but file format, data format, and data analysis, which have multisyllabic heads (format and analysis), can only be spelled as open in accepted English orthography. This pattern holds for countless nouns with few exceptions. For the class with monosyllabic heads, there is a tendency that “compounds tend to solidify as they age,”[5]: 368  which is how a term such as data set becomes dataset, pin-up becomes pinup,[5]: 368  coal mine becomes coalmine, bottle cap becomes bottlecap, and so on. Such alternative forms usually continue to coexist in accepted use; style guides often convene on preferred dictionaries as a way of achieving consistency, by declaring that the headword form there will be the default styling for each such term.

Depends if it’s a fish bowl (a bowl for a fish) or a fishbowl (a big watered down drink you can buy from bad nightclubs)

It’s more that English as a whole is split between a Germanic and Romance ancestry, with the orthography of both sources being represented

It’s way more than those two…

a huge shift in pronunciation

That has absolutely nothing to do with grammar, just spelling…

Like, you seem to be solely focused on spelling.

And that’s my entire point, you don’t notice the other shit because it’s “normal” to you. That’s why you’d be paid money to “teach” English…

The rules are so convoluted and nonsensical (the adjective order is a great example) that even native speakers are often unaware of the rules, we just follow them without understanding them.

You can’t teach a non native speaker all the rules, it’s too much to remember. They need that whole “immersion” thing everyone says but never understands. They need to figure it out thru trial and error and learn it subconsciously otherwise they’ll always be focused on translating into English and abiding every rule and remembering each exception.

That’s also why you see internet comments of absolutely perfect classroom English, where the writer constantly apologized for their poor English. Textbook can be learned, but authentic English speakers rarely speak/write how we were taught, and that is what wealthy foreigners want their kids to learn, how the language is actually used.

That is nowhere near as big of an issue with any other language.

Because English isn’t consistent or logical. There’s a shit ton of exceptions to every “rule” and users constantly change things.

Getting deeper into how language influences our thoughts, and the rise of English could explain “the Americanization” of the world just because of how disorganized it can be leaving room for cheating and the importance it puts on the individual and capitalism:

Studies in psychology have found that bilingual people respond differently when they complete tasks in different languages. For example, one study randomly assigned bilingual people in India to complete a work task in Hindi or English.[10] Social norms were more effective at motivating people to work longer in Hindi, whereas payment was more effective in English, which is similar to results when people work in their native languages in the United States and India. Another study randomly assigned bilingual managers in Hong Kong to rate the importance of different values in English or Chinese.[11] When surveyed English, managers in Hong Kong rated conformity and tradition as less important and rated achievement and hedonism as more important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_thought#Studies_concerning_the_Sapir–Whorf_hypothesis

It’s a fascinating topic, but I fully expect it to be one of those things no one’s heard of before, so people with no idea what is going on will reflexively defend English as a language.

Which ironically enough, they likely wouldn’t experience that response if their native language wasn’t English, even if someone was critizing their hypothetical native language.

Would that end bit basically translate to “if I may”/“if you will”? I know a more literal translation would be “if I may ask/request”. Mein Deutsch ist mittelmäßig und ich brauche mehr Übung.