“You might find that you’ll be able to talk about your field before you are able to talk about the mundane.”
I have found this. I can understand stuff about my field better than anything else. I think it might be due to the more limited vocabulary used. Having discussions about one topic requires vocabulary for one topic; having discussions about a range of topics requires vocabulary for a range of topics, even if those discussions are simpler.
“After 6 months if I’m conversing in mostly German then I get a 10% raise.”
BRILLIANT! Talk about motivation! I guess you will be pretty active at LingQ for the next 6 months.
If neither of you or your wife have duel nationalities and you are both Americans without any relatives in Switzerland, I’m left wondering how you were able to just move to Switzerland and end up with an awesome job a couple of months later. Perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye, could you really both just opt for Switzerland to see how things would turn out? What about work permits and visa applications and residence permits?
Perhaps you are both on some sort of student exchange program…you are the key to the missing piece of the jigsaw.
Spill the beans, spatterson.
My wife and I both have B work visas. We’re not students. My wifes company was merged into a Swiss company and they transferred us out here… somehow we both ended up with B visas. I imagine because her employeer has quite a bit of political pull or prestige (or bribery?? who knows) here in Switzerland.
Apparently me getting a B visa is like “winning the lottery” here. Works for me!
I have a question for spatterson. As a computer hacker, would you still be relying on English as your main working language, even if you are in a German speaking office?
Hmm do you mean will code be written in English (as least… as much English as possible) and/or design documents?
I presume design docs (if we even create them) will be in German. Bug tracking, tasking, etc will probably be given out in German… maybe in English for a short period.
These are good questions… thanks. I need to stall them a bit anyway as I work on other opportunities
What I meant was that you must rely quite heavily on the literature of your subject, whatever that actually is, in order to be able to look stuff up, and this is presumably written primarily in English. Of course the code will be in English to the extent that it always is.
Yeah all that will be in English. The code comments, variable names, function names, etc maybe be in German. I will have to check on that
You need to see if you can get the import bookmarklet to work in your favorite text editor.
How do you have to prove to the company your level inorder to get the 10% raise? If they are nice, I’d bet they’ll give it to you as long as you have made progress.
Contractually speaking, you should get them to pay for a weekly tutor who can certify that you are making progress. Maybe schedule a B1 exam.
Basically what I’m saying here is figure out a way to be sure that you get the 10%, while also getting something free out of the deal. Maybe have them pay for your lingq subscription. Something.
The baseline seems to be informal. No mention of a B1/B2 examination. I think it’ll basically be
I don’t really see it as a 10% raise. More like paying me 10% less to begin with
I have the opposite problem here in Vienna. Basically we always use English, even when I am the only non-native speaker in the room (which is rare). I would like to have meetings in German, but I can’t really say so because I would not understand so well if we did, and it would quickly be obvious. By saying that it is ok to have the meeting in German, I would basically be saying that I don’t care what the contents of the meetings are - this is usually true, but I can’t really say so.