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Another German here, posting from Magdeburg (in the spooky neonazi-riddled East, oooOOOOooo). There's going to be more of us in this thread than Americans, at this rate.King Skinny Pimp posted:gently caress, now I want Lütje Lagen and people to drink them and spill them everywhere with. I miss Germany a lot, I had so much fun there. :[ Because corn is delicious and some people don't know where to stop. I don't drink or smoke so I can't really comment on most of the last page or so (although if the people you know are shocked at the idea of recreational hemp products, you know unusual people); but I can pile on a little more stuff about civilian service, which in my case was 9 months of simple work (on about the order of pushing wheelchairs, moving luggage and crates full of files around the place, etc.) at a hospital focusing mostly on rehabilitation after orthopaedic surgery (hip and knee replacements especially). I had a fairly positive experience of it, although from what I hear there were far worse places I could have ended up in terms of workload and the regular staff's attitude to zivis. There are definitely still worse places for this in Europe than Germany - Greece, for example, is a fairly bad country to pick for being born in if you intend to avoid military service when you grow up, although it used to be worse still. See also and especially: Turkey, Russia. I did really hate the military doctor who did the pre-service examination (though not the full one since I declared in advance that I was going to refuse military service, thank god). Faux-jovial patronizing old bastard.
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Sep 23, 2009 20:24
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Contingency Plan posted:How do Germans today feel about the House of Hohenzollern? Wikipedia tells me that some German monarchists gather at Wilhelm II's burial place in the Netherlands every year, but I imagine they're a tiny fringe group. It's not something that sane people have really deep feelings about - generally people will be vaguely aware that Wilhelm II was a pretty terrible emperor and bears quite a bit of the responsibility for World War I and the increasing tension leading up to it, but there's not some kind of common deep-rooted seething resentment. If I'm at all a representative pick and/or am not completely wrong about the people I know, generally the first reaction to this kind of question will be confusion as to why you'd be expected to have strong feelings as though the Hohenzollern were a relevant family now. How do Americans today feel about Woodrow Wilson? I have to imagine any educated American will have opinions of his achievements and failures and faults and redeeming qualities, but serious emotions? It's not like he's going to be reelected in 2012. There are no monarchists with any degree of influence or public presence in Germany today, which also means nobody has to bother with being especially anti-monarchist. Much of the old nobility still exists, of course, and they still marry among themselves a lot - check out the current head of the Hohenzollern, for example - but they're of no political importance in and of themselves, and don't seem to be trying very hard to change this. CommieRabbit posted:Does anyone still speak rotwelsch? Additionally is there still a deep-rooted presence of itinerant/vagabond culture? Unfortunately, no. Pretty much all uprooted and driven out or eradicated by Nazi repression and the Holocaust. quote:How common is mensur and have any of you participated, witnessed or known a duel or dueler? There are a few fraternities that still do it, but it's not something most students come in contact with (neither, in fact, are traditional fraternities themselves, although this depends somewhat on the university and the field you're in). Occasionally one is startled to be reminded of its continued existence, but that's about it if you're not involved in one of the rare societies where it's still relevant. It also involves more safety gear etc. than it did in its heyday.
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Sep 26, 2009 11:46
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Radd McCool posted:My sister was attending a SCUBA training course in Italy. In her class were some Germans, who at one point pushed the instructor off the pier and into a school of jellyfish below. Why? So that he would be stung, as a joke. He came up shaken and free of life threatening poisons so there was no harm done, but this is very funny. It is characteristic of assholes, who can regrettably be found among Germans in much the same proportion as among any other nationality.
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Sep 28, 2009 17:17
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I learned English by reading books, playing computer games, watching TV, and of course by spending too much time on the internet. I did have to take English in school starting in 7th grade, but I don't think I profited as much from that as I did simply from immersion.elwood posted:I just drowned the teacher in words. Everyone else writes 3000 words essays? Just babble away for a few more pages, make it 6000, get padded on the back for your use of stream of consciousness and net 14 points. I was utterly terrible at these things. It's always been my suspicion that length requirements on essay assignments in school are as they are merely to compensate for the fact that most people will just pour in the most terrifyingly obvious observations and pad and pad to get to the required number, which was a game I didn't want to play. Got okay marks on my Abitur still, but eh.
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Sep 30, 2009 00:27
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FLX posted:Or you could just study in Bielefeld ;-) What the hell are you talking about? There's no such place.
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Aug 1, 2010 00:45
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Greiskul posted:I am a Brazilian student, going to study at Technische Universität Berlin for 1 year. I spend an overall average of something like 4 or 5 € a day for myself, including occasional bigger purchases like some good cheese or a bottle of quality oil or whatever. It's entirely possible to live on less (although perhaps not as much fun), and you certainly won't need a very great deal more than that for one person unless you have really expensive tastes.
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Aug 8, 2010 22:19
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Stinkyhead posted:What are the stereotypes about people from different parts of Germany? Some to add to what OneArmedScissor said: Easterners, in addition to the above, are neonazis. Westerners are arrogant, entitled yuppies and/or snobs (and nobs). Swabians are gigantic cheapskates. Bielefeld doesn't exist. Rhinelanders are drunks. Not Germany, but: Everyone in Switzerland has OCD and/or does everything extremely slowly. Austrians and Bavarians are permanently at one another's throats.
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Aug 10, 2010 15:19
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AlternateNu posted:Well, I just found out that I am heading out to Warnemünde now, instead of Wilhelmshaven for my exchange tour. 2 years in a Cruise Liner Port...Awesome....Anyone in the Rostock-Warnemünde area or familiar with it? I hear its really nice, except outside the city is pretty much nothing but farmland. Rostock is an okay place to be, and the whole nearby coastal area is kind of nice, though it alternates between rural and touristy, often both at once. Do explore the region if you get the chance - for example, go down and visit Schwerin sometime, it's quite a pretty little city (say I, having grown up there). And as has been pointed you're really in decent range of many other interesting places, like Hamburg and Lübeck, and Berlin isn't years away either.
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Aug 22, 2010 23:36
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Ziir posted:What about the question, "Wie sagt man … auf Deutsch?" That's the phrase we learned in my German class, but I never liked it because I always thought it should be, "Wie sagst du / Wie sagen Sie" but of course what do I know. For this kind of thing "man" works much better. I guess your perception must come from the fact that the English equivalent would be "how does one...", which would stand out a bit in an informal context - but in German it's by far the more usual way of phrasing this kind of question. (And if you're asking someone how they personally would say or do something, rather than the generic "you", that would be best done in the subjunctive mood: "Wie würdest du/würden Sie...") edit: in fact, I would go so far as to say that "Wie sagst du..." would almost instantly mark you as a non-native speaker, and probably as an anglophone.
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Aug 27, 2010 09:21
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Ziir posted:I don't think I can make it to the Köln meet next week. I don't get my semester pass for free travel in NRW until October 1st when the semester starts (makes sense I guess...) so it would cost me something like €18,30 each way which seems like a lot for a few drinks. So I'll take a rain check for some other time! You just take them back to the store - any store, not necessarily where you bought them - and get back your deposit. (If you just put them wherever, somebody else is probably going to end up returning them because hey, free money.) Some places (like that internet cafe, apparently) if you buy a drink that comes in a bottle they don't make you pay the deposit on the understanding that you won't take the bottle with you.
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Sep 5, 2010 01:41
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Liface posted:In one of the interviews he did he mentions he specifically doesn't mention the word hipster because "writing about hipsters was passé in 2006". However, why not just say "Berliner" or "scenester"? I don't get it. I mainly get the impression that he's some kind of ultra-bitter double reverse hipster. It's very strange to read.
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Sep 21, 2010 21:06
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It's pretty much just your basic conservative government trying to make sure the country it's running isn't falling behind on general shittiness. Wish we didn't have to deal with these clowns for (probably) three more years.
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Oct 19, 2010 16:24
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That's strange, every supermarket I've been a regular customer of has had maple syrup, even the smaller ones. Where are you looking? It's usually either near the honey with other syrups, or near the baking ingredients.
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Nov 7, 2010 19:33
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A LOVELY LAD posted:Im currently in the process of learning German, fairly early on but I generally hit a snag when it comes to ordering words.. It's not utterly inadmissible (at least if you include an article or something) but basically the only time you see the sentence structure reordered like that is in clumsy poetry ("Ich möchte kaufen einen Wein / denn dann kann ich betrunken sein."). In prose or actual daily speech, huge no.
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Nov 28, 2010 23:23
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My Lovely Horse posted:Only in Baden-Württemberg, Sachsen-Anhalt and Bavaria. Anywhere else should be business as usual. I got back to Magdeburg late yesterday evening and decided to wait until this morning to get groceries because I forgot about this. 
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Jan 6, 2011 13:28
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Don't forget those of us who dislike coffee and don't smoke, which results in no breakfast at all. Your avatar makes me 37 kinds of nostalgic. vvvvvvv Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jan 23, 2011 |
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Jan 23, 2011 12:40
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As far as I can tell there is only a minor river by that name, but it is indeed in that area. The river is entirely inside Poland today, but it does flow into the Neiße (the river forming the southern part of the German/Polish border since the end of WW2) near Zittau and Görlitz, so perhaps whoever told you about the place in question meant a place on the Küpper.
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Jan 25, 2011 09:54
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Ziir posted:Speaking of laziness, something I've picked up here is saying tschö (no I'm not mishearing for ciao) instead of tschüss. Is this some kind of laziness or another dialect thing? It's actually derived from "adieu", and so is closer to its origin than our northern "tschüs" or "tschüss". Unless, as is apparently also suspected by some, that comes from a different language's version of the phrase.
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Jan 28, 2011 20:41
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I don't even know if there's a Starbucks anywhere here. I can't remember seeing one but then I wouldn't have paid attention if I did, since I'm not terribly interested in coffee. They certainly aren't nearly as ubiquitous in Germany as pop culture attempts to convince me they are in America, though. Instead we have four or more different chain or local bakeries on every major street and in every shopping center.Default Settings posted:Speaking of greetings, there are also all the variants of "Grüß dich / Grüssi / Griaß di / Grüß Euch" and so on. "Grüezi", say the Switzermen. "'n Tag"/"Tach auch"/"Tachschön"/... yeah, there are unsurprisingly lots of options for this sort of thing, not all of them regionally incompatible. (The best goodbye, of course, is "Denn! *tongue click*") I've never had that happen, but then I live well north of the Weißwurstäquator, where people aren't terribly confused if they hear "Moinsen!". vvvvvvvv Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Jan 29, 2011 |
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Jan 29, 2011 10:14
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There's three main ways to pronounce "ch" - the two "standard" High German fricative ones are velar (back, after aou - as in "Knochen") and palatal (a little further forward, after consonants and every other vowel - as in "Knöchel"), both voiceless. (I'm not counting the contexts where it's pronounced as a plosive, as in "Fuchs".) Most Swiss German dialects (and some other German dialects in the area) almost exclusively favour the velar (and additionally tend to use the corresponding affricate where other speakers would use a plain "k"). Thirdly, the palatal variety is in some dialects replaced with a postalveolar one, which is what "sch" normally stands for. You probably know this stuff already but if you're coming from Switzerland it might be worth pointing out the difference between the palatal and postalveolar fricatives. ("Zwo" is really common. I've never heard "zwanzisch", it's either "zwanzik" or "zwanzich" (palatal) - perhaps there isn't much overlap between ch -> sch and g -> ch people, or perhaps my experience isn't representative.) Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Jan 29, 2011 |
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Jan 29, 2011 13:02
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So people do say "-isch" for "-ig" in the relevant region, huh. Hadn't actually encountered that one. Here's a mildly interesting thing about German phonetics, while we're on it: the "pf" is apparently a really really rare thing to have in a language. This seems strange to me because it's not something that learners of German ever appear to have much trouble with - unlike, for example, the difficulty English speakers stereotypically encounter in producing the "ch"s and the uvular "r", or hearing the difference between "u" and "ü". But it seems that other than German, only a couple African languages regularly have it or a similar sound, unless Wikipedia lies.
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Jan 29, 2011 14:48
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Of course, if you end up on a very full train you may have to sit on your suitcase next to the door or something. But in that situation it's better to have a lot of luggage because that means you don't have to stand.  If you want to take a bus or a tram or something to/from the train station, in some places local public transport charges you extra for very large pieces of luggage - I've never had to cart anything big around Berlin or Leipzig, but looking at the relevant websites I get the impression that this is not the case in either city. (as affirmed, at least for Berlin, by the posts made while I was checking) Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Feb 21, 2011 |
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Feb 21, 2011 15:46
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German orthography was reformed a few years ago; there was a big to-do about it at the time and this is probably not the place to go into the various things that can be said for or against it in the aggregate or regarding individual changes, but one of the things that happened was that, officially, many words that used to have a 'ß' in them are now spelled with 'ss' instead. The standards in place for written German in Switzerland, incidentally, don't include the 'ß' at all anymore; this is not the case in Germany, however. I don't often see people get this wrong, really, unless you count people who habitually stick to the old rules. Other than that I only know one guy who does it regularly and that's because he doesn't type with a German keyboard layout and is too lazy to compensate.
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Feb 24, 2011 16:18
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AlternateNu posted:There is a pretty good system here in Rostock. Yeah, there is absolutely jack poo poo outside of the city and the rest of Meck-Pomm is pretty drat depressing, but it runs all night, and I can still get everywhere I need to, even living up in Warnemünde. That's only because in every other town in MV you can just walk everywhere worth going to.  I grew up near Schwerin (which is otherwise a nicer place than Rostock  ) and I've never actually used public transport much inside the city - for the above reason - but the bus schedules for getting to Schwerin and back from nearby places are pretty terrible. For example, there are basically no buses at all on Saturdays, so good luck if you don't live in one of the places along the train lines!
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Mar 1, 2011 21:49
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I don't know exactly which other destinations you tried, but Salzburg is a lot closer to Munich than it is to Dresden. I should point out that if I check at bahn.de, I'm getting prices around €120 one way from Dresden to Salzburg tomorrow - twice that is a lot but well short of $500, so I'm not sure what connections raileurope is trying to sell you. If you know when you want to take your train, you can often save a lot of money by booking a while in advance, by the way; if I look for tickets in June now, the price goes down to about €40 (still Dresden-Salzburg one way).
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Apr 2, 2011 21:38
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I did my civilian service at a hospital where there was an orthopedic surgeon named Fleischhauer.
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Apr 14, 2011 20:56
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Birne Helene == Apfelmus mit Sahne.
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May 10, 2011 12:43
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"Still" means non-carbonated. If it looks carbonated from the outside, I guess that's a matter of bottle style or something. (Although if you want non-carbonated water, you should really just get a bottle and fill it from the tap.) Really? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I've never attempted to buy non-carbonated water (not seeing the point) so I guess I wouldn't know for sure. vvvvv Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 18:32 on May 13, 2011 |
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May 13, 2011 18:30
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Knust and Krotzen, respectively.
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Jul 21, 2011 22:18
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For anyone who can read German and is interested in this stuff, this project (which I think I first heard about either here or over in the German language thread in SAL) has a few pretty striking examples of regional variation in colloquial German.
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Jul 26, 2011 00:37
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Depends on what you mean. There has not been a "Prussian" identity in the original sense for a pretty long time - the place was stolen by Germans quite early - but until the Nazis and then the Soviets worked on homogenizing things, there were still many Old Prussian place names and such around the region. I think the Slavic-speaking people of the area have been pretty well absorbed into Polish culture now, although I think you'd be better off asking about that in the Poland thread if there is one. In so far as they haven't, if I'm not mistaken they'd identify as "Masurians" anyway. As for Prussia and Prussians in the German sense, some of those Germans who got kicked out of East Prussia after the war are still alive and still resentful about it, and there remains a small number of German speakers living there; that's about the closest you'll get. Nobody from pretty much anywhere else that was historically part of the kingdom of Prussia will even remotely self-identify as a Prussian except when joking about how Bavarians feel that everyone north of the Main is a Saupreiß or whatever.
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Aug 14, 2011 00:29
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flavor posted:What's that supposed to mean? Prussia was stolen by Germans? It was German all along. Not until like the 13th century or so. It's named after a Slavic people that used to live in what was later called East Prussia.
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Aug 14, 2011 13:08
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It's entirely meaningful, it just isn't recent. The Teutonic Knights grabbed the land (on a neighboring Polish duke's invitation, more or less) and then a bunch of German settlers were moved in to take it over.
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Aug 14, 2011 13:58
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niethan posted:How do you even define "original" this is a dumb discussion. The only point I was making is that those guys are where the term "Prussian" comes from even if they were already pretty much entirely irrelevant by the early 18th century or so when German-run Prussia really became prominent. Hip Flask posted:The 'original' Old Prussians were a Baltic people, not a Slavic one. Whoops, yeah. The Baltic languages are more closely related to Slavic than to other branches of the Indo-European family but they're considered distinct. Sorry.
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Aug 14, 2011 15:19
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I really don't get why you're so invested in this dumb argument. Are you a time-travelling Teutonic Knight offended by my choice of words? I apologize.
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Aug 15, 2011 12:45
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It's a regional thing - if you've spent most of your time in Germany in the south or west (checking your first posts in this thread tells me you were in Aachen, and this looks like Berlin now?), it's not too surprising that you haven't run into it before.
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Aug 22, 2011 18:08
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Post more Loriot videos. The man needs remembering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqJCEYS9WdI This one is a good example of a type of skit he did quite frequently: the ever-increasingly nightmarish social situation. (It also has a good universal punchline.)
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Aug 28, 2011 20:41
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbz5sy8jPXA I love this one not just for the skit as such but also for the desperately hideous and stuffy decor and outfits. A matchless triumph of the Spießbürgertum.
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Aug 28, 2011 23:33
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How popular is "that popular"? I was vaguely aware that such a song existed and I think I heard five seconds of it on television once.
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Sep 6, 2011 16:25
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That's a really weird way of putting it. The sounds are distinct (/ç/ vs. /ʃ/ in standard German, although some dialects collapse them) but they are actually pretty similar in the perception of someone not trained to hear the difference. This is something people often forget - what one "hears" when listening to speech is heavily influenced by one's own knowledge of languages. This is very useful for fast decoding - recognizing variant pronunciations, understanding muffled or slurred speech, and so forth - but it can lead to difficulties in learning other languages. One time I was talking to an American friend (who doesn't speak German) about language stuff and we came to how difficult ü (/yː/ or /ʏ/) seems to be for Anglophones; I recorded some u/ü transitions and minimal pairs and she couldn't even perceive that there was any difference at all. And on the flipside it took me a long time to figure out that English actually has voiced stops at the end of words sometimes, simply because German doesn't.
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Sep 7, 2011 20:02
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