Deutschverständnis

Now that I have been here a while you might wonder how my German is faring. I’d say I'm at the stage where, in order to understand 99%, I need people to speak at a moderate speed. Nonetheless I was surprised during a lecture about Swiss history and politics that I understood almost everything, even the jokes. Outside of lectures it is trickier. Swiss-German is so different that even native Germans who have been here for several years don’t understand it. Luckily most people in SG are happy to speak German-German (Hochdeutsch) when asked. In addition everything is written in Hochdeutsch, giving me ample opportunity to increase my vocabulary. The exceptions that prove this rule are the SMSs. These are, more often than not, in Swiss-German and to make them utterly unintelligible they follow different spelling rules depending on which part of Switzerland the sender is from. Speaking of words, here are, in an expression of my weird humor, my two new favorite words: Kartoffelstandort and Schwalbenkönig.

LG