It is an expression of a contrarian point or a correction of some kind

That's the spirit of it

No precise meaning

what German lacks in intonation change it makes up for with emphasis words called 'particles'

Aye.

Ooh, never thought about it in that light

It's true though

So leaving out a word lieke 'mal' is a stronger assertion of commad of the more polite, "Hor mal zu"

as opposed to 'Hor zu!'

Mal does not have a direct tanslation either, but it has fewer options, so it is easier to explain

yup; you'd translate it using an idiom or intonation change

"one time" if translated literally or "one" (as in an unquantified amount of persons)

once

Ah that too

Wait, also as "let's"

but otherwise it just 'softens' the verb

"Mal schauen"

Schau mal

Dang, I never thought about these particles as having no fixed meaning

yeah, same thing; "let's go to the zoo" vs "we're going to the zoo"

And i speak german since I am 5

Hrm, so German is more literal than English (as the latter heavily relies intonation)?

wow, impressive

Although, I'm looking for confirmation bias at the moment, to be honest.

I guess being fluent in a language robs you of the perspective, because you start taken things as a given and never examine/question them

i learned as an adult in conversation more than text

diffrent experience

(Back to structure & order as we were discussing earlier.)

my spoken is about 10x better than written; most words i haven't seen before lol

yup, well structure and order are the cornerstones of german

so it the idea of 'definition' as most noun forms don't require adjectives and can stand alone

it also encourages 'discrete thinking'

Right, and the bias which I'm trying to back up is language informs thought processing.

cause there is a penalty for every detail phrase

I went to the vet... with the cat... on the way to the mall.... with Susan... etc

@Laucivol Not quite. English is just "analytical" language
Which means you are constantly solving a puzzle whenever you read an english sentence
The words in english have such a plethora of meanings, that a listener/reader must pay attention to the sentence context in order to assign the correct meaning
It is literally a semantic sudoku you have to solve on the fly

for each of those phrases in german, i'd have to move the verb to the end then remember the order

Which is hella fun, I would add - Uksio.

It does make you adopt a certain way of thinking

Right, which is the premise I'm at

maybe, also adds to confusion