Recently I have been pondering the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which: postulates a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it (wikipedia says it better than I can!) This isn´t surprising given that I spend a large amount of time learning a new language and I am fairly immersed in a culture I wasn´t familiar with 4 months ago, and I still am not used to. My language is starting to develop to the point where I can over hear conversations, read things and get the general idea (I finished my second romance novel the other day) and sort of understand television.
My high contact with Germans time is during my commute, which takes over four hours of my day when I head out to Basel. What are these German´s saying to each other? Why doesn´t anybody smile? Why do they look so pissed off at the world? Why do the men at my work never smile at me, or make eye contact, or respond to me saying Hallo (the Germanized hello). Who knows. But I think I am starting to get an idea. When your language has over 12 ways to say the, who has time to respond to an innocuous Hello. When you have to think about declination all day, how can you look anything but pissed off.
Ok, that´s not where I was going originally, but these serious Germans undergo a miraculous transformation when they turn on the English. Suddenly they are smiling and animated and energetic. Jane made the observation that many German men go from sounding sort of manly and serious in German to becoming giggling and valley girl esque in English. I certainly noticed that with my trainer!
I am excited to find out what actually goes on when the Germans speak German because at this point all I know is they say genau (exactly) zum bespiel (for an example) and alles klar (everything is clear) way too often. Just thinking about those examples is a peak into the cultural window.
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