The first time I had ever heard of “Swiss German” was when I was preparing to move from Düsseldorf, Germany to Rapperswil, Switzerland. My German neighbors had me over for a farewell barbecue and they said to me: “Whatever you do, don’t come back and visit us speaking that Swiss German.” I was aware that the Germans had a somewhat love/hate relationship with their southern neighbors, but I had no idea the Swiss spoke some different form of their common language. In fact, I was quite confident with the German that I had picked up over my three years in Düsseldorf, and I figured it would be quite an easy transition from one country to the other. I was wrong.
Posts in category German vocabulary
Birthdays and Friends
This year is a momentous one in the eyes of some people, because I am turning forty. I’m turning forty in a new country, and all of my oldest and closest friends live in other ones. But I am not despairing, and I am not ignoring this runden Geburtstag. (A runder Geburtstag is one that ends in a zero.) If I were still in Germany, I would most definitely be having a party. So, we’ll be having one here in Ireland as well, and as expected, many of my German friends have already said they are coming. What a perfect excuse to go on vacation! With 30 days of holidays at their disposal and a booming economy, my German friends can afford to come over to the Emerald Isle.
Ah, but what are friends? Americans seem to call everyone their friends. Facebook has turned even the most distance of acquaintances, from someone you met on the bus yesterday to someone you knew in preschool, into “friends.” One of the first things I discovered when I moved to Germany to be with my future husband, having already lived there for seven years in the previous decade, was the meaning of friends in a German context. Many of his friends have been with him since childhood. Part of that is because people used to grow up in a house and stay in the area. This may not apply as much nowadays, what with Fernbeziehungen and the global economy, but it was still true for my husband, until I dragged him off to Ireland. READ MORE »
An Adjusted Adventszeit
In the past week, I had to adjust to the fact that Christmas is OVER, a week earlier than I had become accustomed to. I was used to our southern German world being shut down not just from the week of Christmas to New Year’s but also through the first week of January thanks to Three Kings. (Note: During my time writing for the German Way blog, the most Wiki-ed or Google-ed things I’ve had to look up are Catholic holidays and food.) I missed my older daughter’s first gymnastics class last Wednesday. Back in Aalen, there wouldn’t have been Turnen or any Musik Schule or anything like that scheduled.
This year, I missed the Adventszeit and the tradition of celebrating Christmas time for the whole month of December. And although Christmas decorations start being sold at Target the minute Halloween goes on clearance, that is not the same. I feel that Christmas is largely for consumerism here. Adventszeit is more oriented towards baking Weihnachtsplätzchen together (though I’ll concede that an American Christmas cookie exchange is an efficient and smart thing. I admire my friend Moni and my husband’s Tante Liane for baking at least 10 different kinds of cookies for their cookie bags/tins each year.) The point of a Christkindelmarkt in every town is not just to sell as many tschotchke to as many suckers as possible, but rather to provide a cozy space for people to drink their Glühwein together, for children to pet some farm animals and ride some rides and of course for us to find some sweet, handmade, wooden ornaments to share with our poor, plastic-invaded relatives back home. READ MORE »
Living the German Way in San Diego Part 1
I admit that I was probably a bit whingey in my last message. I’ve had some time to get over my homesickness for Germany and Europe and embrace San Diego. It’s nothing like Deutschland, but the living is so easy and the weather is as perfect (always in the 20s C/70s F and no humidity) as they say. The people are also extremely friendly and positive. So positive, that it rose my quasi Teutonic suspicions at first.
Instead of sulking back and looking for things to complain about since the weather wasn’t going to hold anymore, I decided to smile back and enjoy the sun! Meanwhile, our relocation agent asked me what was the one thing I missed most since being in San Diego. My answer was my friends and being able to speak German.
I knew that we would encounter more German speaking families once our kids started at Die Rasselbande, the German preschool we found in San Diego. But it would be another six weeks before our older daughter would start there.
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Zwetschgen and the end of summer in Germany
Here in Baden-Württemberg the school year begins again this week. While my children are not yet school age, we’ve been enjoying rituals associated with this time of year: a last visit to the Freibad (outdoor public pool), buying closed toe shoes for autumn/winter and picking Zwetschgen (Italian plums) off of friends’ trees.
Before I moved to Germany, I had never seen a Zwetschge. Plums had always been round, more like smaller nectarines, with varying shades of yellow flesh and yellow or purple skins. In Germany, I first encountered these elegant, deep purple, slender ellipses hanging low on a tree on Jahnstrasse, the street of my first flat. It was August, my second month living here, when I would gingerly step around the squashed and whole pieces of fruit at my feet, wondering if they were edible. It took several late summer visits to the Bäckerei till I realized that the word Zwetschgen was synonymous with the word Pflaumen (plum) and that the tree on my street was in fact a Zwetschgen tree.
Now that the Zwetschge has entered my life, I have been searching for ways to keep her there all year around.
You Can Du Me: The Du/Sie Question
The question of du or Sie, informal versus formal “you,” is a perennial one for expats in a place like Germany. Many European languages make a linguistic distinction based on interpersonal relationships. These distinctions have fallen out of use in modern English.
Lucky for those learning English. But expats learning the German language and culture frequently struggle with the question of informal versus the formal. When you are in the midst of a strange culture, you are constantly out of your safety zone. Any faux pas, no matter how slight, becomes a major drama in your own mind. Getting du/Sie wrong can lead to self-doubt and undermining yourself as you try to acclimate in a land of strangers who never quite act the way you think they should. READ MORE »
Airing out a German phobia: the killer draft
Sign on a streetcar window in Vienna.
Austrians also fear drafts!
One definition of a split second: the time it takes between opening a window on a hot train and hearing a German say the two most dreaded words in the German language: “Es zieht!” (“There’s a draft!”) In the summer on German trains, in the days before most were air conditioned, I can remember betting with friends how long it would take before a German would close the window when the train began to pull out of the station. It was usually under 10 seconds. An open window while the train was standing still was okay, but the minute air began to flow through the window as the train picked up speed, you could hear the slam of windows being shut — even if it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32°C) outside! READ MORE »
The German School System
Today I happened to read an article about reforming the Berlin school system, and I use the term “school” intentionally — rather than “education” system; we’re talking about schools here (and Germany has compulsory school attendance laws rather than compulsory education). The article was entitled “Kulturkampf ums Gymnasium” — roughly “culture war over the Gymnasium.” Of course, as most of my readers know, a Gymnasium in Germany is a public academic secondary school leading to university study. It has nothing to do with an athletic gymnasium (Turnhalle), other than sharing a Greek root word. (English took the sports element, while German took the academic side from Greek gymnasion, a place for training both the mind and body.) READ MORE »
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