Can you fluently say this: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz?
I can, so I assume I´m German (if you wanna learn, should I put the link here? Dunno... aw, well,
here go.
I can´t recommend it though. I´m still kinda mad I had to learn useless French at school and due to the likeness fail to learn Spanish which I could´ve used very often by now...
I found this funny link about How To Be German in 20 steps Part I at the Shopblogger.
Naturally I had to see if I am German enough to be German.
It´s a tad long, so I browsed through it, only and kept only the important stuff. Still funny.
So, here we go, I put the borrowed original text in italic and my two cents in normal font:
#1 Put on your house shoes
"So, here we are then my little Ausländer. Your first day as an aspiring German. You’ll have woken up in your bed, probably because it’s gotten light outside and you don’t have curtains, because curtains are evil and suggest you have something to hide.
Now, you’ll need to carefully make up your half of the bed (you should be sleeping in a double bed made up of two single mattresses and two single duvets). What it lacks in nocturnal romance, it more than makes up for in practicality, the most prized of German possessions.
Now, careful! Don’t step off of the Bettvorleger yet, there is a very high chance that the floors will be ever so slightly colder than you expect! So cold you may go into some kind of morning shock. That’s why you need house shoes! They are requirements of Germanism.
I would like to be able to tell you why Germans are so in love with their house shoes, I’ve asked several but still have no definitive answer. Not because they’ve not told me, but because the answer is so incredibly unromantic, so sensible, practical and boring that my happy little barefoot brain has no idea where to store information of that nature and so just gives up committing it to memory."
... why, yes! Pic: My shoes.
Buuut! Certainly we have one mattress and one duvet.
#2 Eat a long breakfast
"Coming from England, I was very surprised to see how important the kitchen is to the German people. The English tend to treat it purely as a room of function, like the toilet, only with a fridge. You get in, do what you’ve got to do, get out.The living room is the heart of the home.
For the Germans, it’s a different story, they are happiest and spend the most time in their kitchens. It’s the most practical room in the house. You have a table, water, coffee, food, radio, serious, correct-posture-encouraging seating. They’ve correctly realised, if trouble does come calling, they’ll be best prepared for it by holing up in their kitchens.
German breakfasts are not meals, but elaborate feasts. If it’s a weekend, every square inch of the table will be smothered in an assortment of meats, cheeses, fruits, jams, spreads and other condiments. It’ll look like someone broke in and while hunting for valuables just tipped the contents of all the cupboards out onto the table.
The first time I experienced breakfast in a German WG it lasted so long that I drifted off into a sort of breakfast coma and they had to wake me with some eszet, which is a sort of chocolate strip you put on bread. I didn’t know you could legally combine chocolate and bread, it was quite a revelation. Now I just eat eszet with everything, and slowly I’ve learnt to eat more and also slower, during the long drawn out German breakfasts." ...
So not true, for us, at least. I admit that we do sit in the kitchen to watch TV every weekend morning and every night for brekkie/dinner/preparing food for the work day.
What we eat is on weekend morning breadroll, one or max two types of cheese and cold meat. Maybe a cooked egg here and there. And Mumme jam.
#3 Planning, Preparation, Process
"So far, so good. Look at you, you’re up early, you’ve got your radio on, no doubt some Depeche Mode is blasting out, you’re eating a slow and ponderous German breakfast, you’re acclimatising very well, young Ausländer.
Now you need to enter the headspace of the Germans. If you want to be one, you need to think like one, which is a big task and we’ll cover it in more detail in later steps. But for now, start accepting the three central tenets of Germanism. The three P’s. Planning, Preparation, Process.
Being a good German is about understanding the risks, insuring for what can be insured, preparing for what cannot. You are your own life’s project manager. Plan and prepare. Make spreadsheets, charts and lists. Think about what you’re doing each day and how you can make it more efficient.
Is it possible you arrange your shoe storage so that the most used items are nearer the top, reducing bending time? I don’t care if you’re 17, it’s taking you nearly a full minute to get your shoes on, buy a shoe horn! Optimise your processes!
Just because they call it spontaneity, doesn’t mean it can’t be scheduled. There’s a time and place for fun, and it’s to be pre-decided and marked in the calendar."...
Gah. Not really.
#4 Get some insurances
"Everyone knows it’s a jungle out there. Hence why we created the phrase. So, plucky Ausländer before you go out into the jungle and start swinging from its high branches, it’s wise you be sensibly insured. Germans, being imaginative people ran a little wild with the concept of sensibly insured.
Don’t be surprised if the Germans you meet all have personal insurance advisors. My girlfriend communicates with her insurance advisor more often than I do with my mother. If someone invented insurance insurance, an insurance against not having the right insurance, we’d all be treated to the sight of 80 million people dying of happiness."
Not true. For us, that is! And sometimes I wonder if I should get some more...
I mean... what if? Ya know?
I once drove into a young child - with my bike. Luckily the Father knew it was his fault and let me go..
#5 Dress seriously
"Plan made for the day? Insurances in place? Great. Good work! Now it’s time to change out of your Schlumperklamotten and head outside to face the day head on. You’re going to need to get appropriately dressed.
*WARNING! AUSLÄNDER! WARNING!* Outside is this thing called nature, nature is fickle and not to be trusted! It dances to its own illogical, changeable tune. Best dress on the safe side...
Get some of those funky Jack Wolfskin shrousers, the trousers that zip off into shorts... "
Nah. Have to admit, though, Ingo has zipper-trousers that can be long or short in no time. Just zip.
#6 Speak German
"Every nation has done things it should be embarrassed about. Dark acts in its history. The Germans are no exception. You know of what I talk – the German language. Deutsch is mostly an incomprehensible jumble of exceptions. A dungeon designed to trap foreigners and hold them hostage, repeatedly flogging them with impenetrable and largely useless grammatical devices, whose only merit is to very, very, explicitly state who has what and what is being done to whom, by whom.
The bad news is that for you to fully blend with the Germans, you’ll need to learn it... You’ll zip along making great progress and really enjoying wrapping your tongue around such delights as Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel, Weltschmerz and Zeitgeist...
You’ll waste so much time memorising genders (PRO TIP: never learn a noun without its article, going back later and adding them in is very time consuming and inefficient). Yet, without knowing the gender of the noun, you can’t accurately decline the endings of the sentences, nouns and adjectives or adverbs. Which is utterly pointless anyway, and does next to nothing to increase comprehension but without it you’ll say very embarrassing things like einer grosser Wasser, instead of ein grosses wasser. I know, cringeworthy...
Goes with French. Always learn a word with it´s gender.
Not that difficult, I´d say...
Can be confusing, though.
In English and French the moon is female, the sun male. Other way round in German.
#7 Get some more qualifications
"When I first moved here I was given the advice that “while in England, it’s he who drinks the most and doesn’t vomit on his shoes, that gets the girl, here it’s he who knows the most about philosophy that gets the girl”. That’s an exaggeration...
An outdated idea in English culture, where everything is on a first-name basis, I am Adam, he is John, it’s what in our heads that shows our qualifications and intelligence.
Here, it’s the letters before or after our full name, letters we use when addressing each other, for example Herr Dr or Frau Prof Dr.h.c Schmidt, none of this first name over-familiarity.
Not true. These days most people at the workplace use first-names ad hoc.
I still can laugh my head off, though, when I think of my now "boss" P being a trainee having to call my then boss Dr. K, whilst I called him M.
We were friends, P and I and hence talked often also about M.
One day in a meeting M said he got into trouble due to P´s work.
And P went very loud:
Duuuuuuu?!!!! ... ähhhh. SIE, certainly.
That´s probably ten years away now and still :-)
The next day he offered her M and du, btw :-)
#8 Obey the red man
"
I think the often exaggerated stereotype that Germans love to follow the rules all comes down to one little illuminated red man. Guardian and God of the crossing pedestrian. To dare challenge his authority and step gingerly out into a completely empty road when he is still red, is to take great personal risk...
No, what you really risk is the scorn, the tutting and the shouts of “Halt!” from nearby Germans. Who will now consider you an irresponsible, possibly suicidal, social renegade..."
Mostly true. And in larger cities right if young kids are near. How else are they supposed to learn?
#9 Drink Apfelsaftschorle
"Germans fear any beverage that doesn’t fizz. It brings them out in a cold sweat. It’s a great comedic joy to live in a country where you can watch tourists and foreigners buying “classic” water, thinking that since for millions of years now “classic” water, you know, the kind that fallen from the sky since the dawn of time, was still, uncarbonated water, it would be the same here, right?
Oh no. Millions of years of water history have been conveniently forgotten. “Classic” means carbonated, of course. You big silly. Learn to like it. If not, when visiting the homes of your new German friends, you’ll request tap water and they’ll look at you like you are some primitive savage they just found in the woods covered in a blanket of your own hair.
Related to this is Apfelsaftschorle...."
Tap water - I do drink it, I hate "fizz" in water and the stupid idea of carrying it in the house when it comes from the tap!
And I don´t like Apfelsaftschorle, bah...
#10 Eat German food
"It’s hard to discuss German cuisine without mentioning Wurst, at which point you’ll feel like I’m smacking you about the head with the stereotype stick...
The other notable time of year is Spargel Saison, where the country goes gaga as the almightly Spargel is being waved around everywhere, like a sort of culinary magic wand, which coincidentally it does rather resemble..."
(Sadly) I don´t like fresh Spargel. Only canned one. The hype is not mine.
Part II will follow....
