Well, pretty soon you may need to learn to cook local delicacies to show respect and you won’t be able to call it sacrifice!
Yes, well, thanks to a certain LingQ member I now have a raclette making device. So I’ve got that covered
@ spatterson
Your comic
Is about 37% true.
I recommend reading the rest of them. Some are quite funny
Well all be damned… that comic is false. I just picked up an order from the butcher shop this morning and placed another order. It was quite funny to see their faces… I know they were thinking “You know we speak perfect English… oh what the hell he’s making sense in German” and of course “Hmm… that not quite the correct grammar”
Edit: Ugh. Spelling. See, if I stop using English I start making mistakes
The comic certainly contains a grain of truth - but I think one can exaggerate these things. It wasn’t my experience of living in Germany that everybody replied in English! In the early days it would have been perhaps 35% or 40% of strangers who did this, but later on only 5% or 10%.
However it is more annoying later on! When one is clearly a beginner people are just trying to be helpful. But when one is clearly entirely capable of holding a conversation in German, it is actually quite rude to try to switch to English, IMO.
@force
I couldn´t agree more. ^^
I have a friend from Hamburg and I have to say, I have had this exact conversation with her.
@ force
“But when one is clearly entirely capable of holding a conversation in German, it is actually quite rude to try to switch to English”
This happens all the time in Vienna, especially in shops and restaurants, and it is quite annoying. It is not that I think I will learn any German by ordering food in a restaurant or buying milk at a supermarket using only German, but it is very discouraging nontheless. Whether or not it is what they actually mean, it always feels like they are saying that my German is not good enough. It is especially annoying when people babble at me in Wienerisch, and when I tell them in German that I don’t understand, they decide that I obviously don’t understand German and start speaking English.
However, I don’t want to call it rude. Probably their behaviour is understandable given their experience with foreigners. When 90% of foreigners they meet know no more than 10 words in German, of course they will assume that I don’t.