Doch and Other Deutsch

(you will probably never use any of this, fair warning)

Today I want to talk a little about German, i.e. the language they speak in Austria (in case you didn't already know that). I would now definitely consider myself mostly conversational in German, but it did not come easy.... at all. With four versions of "the" and "a", lots of conjugations for everything, and plenty of vocabulary learning; German is definitely a process. I took two years of German in lower high school and would happily credit that with teaching me how to count, color names, some basic conjugation if a piece of paper is included, and various other tidbits that honestly did not help me that much (sorry). When I came to Austria we had an intensive two week language course which really laid the foundation for my German skills but every day I am still learning. Some interesting things I have learned about German are as follows.

There is not a specific word for "do". You can make something (Machen) but you CAN NOT simply "do" it.

For every word you have to conjugate forms for "ich, du, er/sie/es, wir, ihr, Sie/sie" aka "I, you, he/she/it, we, they all, and formal You" but here is where this gets bad.... all of these words and conjugations change for "Dativ" and "akusitive" which I am not going to get into because I promise it will give you a headache, but trust me on this one (or just google it).

There are lots of quirks and struggles with "Hoch Deutsch" or normal German but here in Austria the dialect is really different. While I usually speak Hoch Deutsch with my host family, teachers, and friends I have obviously picked up some Austrian Dialect (but only for my city, every place has a different dialect and it is so difficult even for the Austrians to understand sometimes). My dialect here in Linz is called Muhlviertel, by the way (I'm pretty sure). So here are a few examples of why dialect is hard having learned only "Hoch Deutsch" in school and language camp.

(HD=Hoch Deutsch, AD=Austrian Dialect)

Laufen

HD-Walking

AD-Running (there is not dialect word for walking, they just use "gehen" which means "going")

HD-Ja

AD-Jo

HD-nein

AD-nahhhh

January

HD-Januar

AD-Janner

HD-Ich habe

AD-I hob

HD-Guten Tag

AD-Gruß Gott/Gruß die/Gruß Euch (again conjugations)

HD-Auf Wiedersehen

AD-Wierderschon

(a different goodbye, by the way it is really common to say goodbye in at least 2 ways)

AD-Pfiat di!

Now if you don’t feel comfortable with the German language after spending 5 minutes reading my blog post, don't worry. Almost everybody I've met here speaks English. For the first couple of months here everybody always tried to speak to me in English and I did (and still do....) find great joy in answering them in German. It is such a cool feeling every time I can tell someone what a word is in English or answer or question randomly, or really participate in a conversation. I really like it.

Now that I have done some bragging about my German I feel much need to tell you some of my biggest German mistakes (so far).

Every time my host mother hung up the phone she would say, "tchuss Pfiat di" (pronounced chuice feetde). I thought she was saying Tchuss vertig. (fertig)Vertig means "finished". I literally thought she was announcing on the phone that she was finished....OOPS!

This is the best one....

I was sending an email to my counselor about transferring money and I kept writing "putzen" which I thought was a coverall term for put.... It’s not. "Puzten" means to clean. I almost emailed my counselor asking him to clean the money into my account. Good thing I had my host mother check that, although I'm not sure I will ever live that down.

One last thing I learned about the German Language is "doch" and to be fair I have been here for seven months and I am still unsure how to use that correctly in context, so don't worry about it ;)

I hope my bits of German knowledge were helpful for you or at least interesting (I’m assuming if it wasn’t you would not have read this far!) Thanks for reading and get ready because more Austrian culture stuff will be on a blog near you (mine) soon!