Would you like some English with that?
I was back in our local coffee shop (see the Final Solution post below) this morning. These coffee places seem to be springing up everywhere and have muffins, bagels, all the usual American stuff. English menu, too. It always feels a bit redundant to say, "Ein double latte to go, bitte". But they make damn good coffee...
But something was different today. Although the guys who work there pretty much always talk to us in English, they were talking to EACH OTHER in English, too. It makes me wonder sometimes why I bothered to learn German if English is taking over, but I find learning new languages fun - unless that language is Japanese. Impossible. Anyway, one guy was saying, "I might go to Bridget Jones tonight, if I can convince the other fags to go with me". (All the people who work there seem to be gay, or maybe they just have good taste in clothes.)
About the whole talking in English thing. Sometimes my boyfriend will attempt some German and get a reply in English. I don't think he really cares, but I get annoyed when it happens to me. It makes me feel like my German is too crap to bother responding to, although they probably don't mean it that way. But if I don't speak German to Germans, where can I speak it?
Yesterday I went with a friend to the Pergamon museum, one of Berlin's most famous museums on Museum Island in town. I hadn't been there for five years and had forgotten how amazing it was. It doesn't just have a few old broken bits of ancient Greek vases (although I'm a bit of a geek and love ancient Greek stuff), it has entire gateways and alters from Greece and modern-day Turkey and Iraq.
On the one hand, I question the morals behind nabbing other countries' relics and carting them home, but on the other hand it's educating people, so...
As we went outside the sun was setting (yes, at 4pm). The sun had shown itself for a few minutes, for the first time in weeks, and the sunset was a deep pink. Sadly, I didn't have my camera and my friend's pxt phone was crap, but it was really beautiful, take my word for it ;)
But something was different today. Although the guys who work there pretty much always talk to us in English, they were talking to EACH OTHER in English, too. It makes me wonder sometimes why I bothered to learn German if English is taking over, but I find learning new languages fun - unless that language is Japanese. Impossible. Anyway, one guy was saying, "I might go to Bridget Jones tonight, if I can convince the other fags to go with me". (All the people who work there seem to be gay, or maybe they just have good taste in clothes.)
About the whole talking in English thing. Sometimes my boyfriend will attempt some German and get a reply in English. I don't think he really cares, but I get annoyed when it happens to me. It makes me feel like my German is too crap to bother responding to, although they probably don't mean it that way. But if I don't speak German to Germans, where can I speak it?
Yesterday I went with a friend to the Pergamon museum, one of Berlin's most famous museums on Museum Island in town. I hadn't been there for five years and had forgotten how amazing it was. It doesn't just have a few old broken bits of ancient Greek vases (although I'm a bit of a geek and love ancient Greek stuff), it has entire gateways and alters from Greece and modern-day Turkey and Iraq.
On the one hand, I question the morals behind nabbing other countries' relics and carting them home, but on the other hand it's educating people, so...
As we went outside the sun was setting (yes, at 4pm). The sun had shown itself for a few minutes, for the first time in weeks, and the sunset was a deep pink. Sadly, I didn't have my camera and my friend's pxt phone was crap, but it was really beautiful, take my word for it ;)
posted by Shona @ 11:44 AM
2 Comments:
At December 6, 2004 at 1:17 PM,
Craig said…
I'm a listmember on two German genealogy lists, one of which only allows posts in German, so for the past six months or so I've been getting about 30 e-mails a day in German. Only a few of the posts relate to my ancestors, but I have to read quite a few to tell if they might be relevant, so my German reading ability is growing by leaps and bounds. I don't post very often so the writing still requires using a dictionary for almost every word. It hasn't helped my speaking ability, but I watch Deutsche Welle once in a while and my ear is definitely getting better.
At December 10, 2004 at 3:39 PM,
Neil @ DNALogic said…
I've lived in Germany 8 or so years now had a German girlfriend for 9 and speak, well, pretty good German (he said modestly). But I still have an English accent. I hate, positively hate it when people hear that accent and reply to me in English. It used to annoy me more when I was trying to learn, now it only gets on my nerves when someone with really BAD English speaks to me. The lady in my local bakery said this morning "Today, much cold, ja? Vacation I want to make". It was tempting to reply with an incredibly convuluted English sentence, but I just smiled/grimmaced, put on my best Swabian accent and said "adé".
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