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How to get Germans to speak German to you | ||
Tags: Convincing native speakers | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5279 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 25 of 51 17 March 2014 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree, in principle they are doing the polite thing, and the same goes for people in the street. It generally comes from a wish to be helpful. It is only when your language skills are better than theirs, or you have asked them to please speak the local language that it gets really annoying. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6648 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 51 17 March 2014 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Apart from isolated questions etc. I don't start speaking a local language before I think I can deal with any reasonable answer. And once I have decided that I'm ready then I need a very weighty reason to switch to anything else. And in practice I almost never have a problem - people speak to me in the local language. And else we get a bilingual conversation because I refuse to budge. There are a few exceptions, but so few that I almost can enumerate them:
Once I stayed four nights at a fourstar hotel in Maputo in Moçambique, and I had been speaking Portuguese from day one to the staff - even about things like getting my refrigerator switched on and recuperating a somewhat delapidated guidebook which had been removed from my room because it looked like rubbish (well, it did). But halfway through my stay I was asked when I intended to remove my things from the room - the room had only been booked for two nights. But I had proof that I had paid for 4 nights, so a member of a Japanese group had to be transferred to another hotel. I took that discussion in English, both to mark that this meant war!!! .. and to deprive the staff of the advantage they had by speaking in Portuguese, which they obviously spoke better than I did. And once in a hotel in Timisoara in Romania I had walked many kilometers from the zoo to the town centre and was so tired when I finally reached my hotel that I made several errors in a row while speaking Romanian. But somehow I discovered that the lady at the reception spoke Italian so instead of English we switched to Italian. I have had a few cases where people tried to speak to me in English because I didn't know a certain word - like during my latest trip to the Netherlands, where I checked into a hotel in Delft on December 30 and wanted to book a breakfast for New Years day where the shops might be closed. But no way - I simply couldn't remember the word for breakfast in Dutch ('ontbijt') so the conversation was heading straight into English while I stood there fumbling around with my Dutch. And the simple solution was to ask the man what breakfast was called in Dutch - and then we could continue the process in Dutch without any further ado. At the start of the same visit time I bought my Dutch transport card in English because there was a long queue behind me at the train station in Schiphol and I was not quite sure of the exact name of the card (actually I have already forgotten it again). But right after that I bought my first Dutch pizza in Dutch. I have also had a few cases where I had to repete something in English because some person didn't believe the things I had said in the local lingo - like way back in 1992 when I had a 1. class reservation in a train from Barcelona to Madrid - and the car simply wasn't on the train. OK, I was right and they found another seat for me. In such cases I understand the need to switch languages to clarify things, but after that I return to the local language. But I can't muster even the most minimal shed of understanding for the jerk at the ticket sale at the Montpellier Aquarium who kept speaking English to me "because I had an accent". Of course I have an accent - I'm Danish, not French. And he had too - in English. But I got my ticket and proceeded into the abyss where nobody tried to impose their broken English on me. Edited by Iversen on 17 March 2014 at 12:56pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4652 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 27 of 51 17 March 2014 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The name of the card is the OV-chipkaart.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6648 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 51 17 March 2014 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh yes, now I remember. And I have even 10€ left on such a card - but I can use them next time I visit your country.
By the way, I just noticed that this thread specifially is about German in Germany. And I can't remember one single case where I have had a problem in Germany. But I don't feel that I have had more problems in Spain than in Germany, even though my German is more fluent than my Spanish. Of course people in the tourist industry in Spain often try speaking to an obvious tourist in English or German instead of Spanish because they don't expect people from Northern or Central Europe to speak Spanish - but once they have found out that you can speak their language at a decent level the Spaniards also are willing to speak Spanish to you. At least that's my experience. And once again a personal anecdote: I once visited Valencia and asked an elderly couple about the way to the aquarium (which is the center piece of a whole 'ciutat de les arts i les ciencies'). The husband first began explaining in Spanish, but then switched to English and I could see that his wife was glowing with pride for having a clever husband who could speak foreign languages. In such a case you should of course not humiliate the man by sticking to Spanish, and I wouldn't count speaking English in such a case as a breach of the conditions for a monolingual trip. But people in the tourist industry are supposed to speak English, and they have lots of other tourists to experiment on, so for them there is no mercy - they will have to live with my Spanish (or Catalan), and I don't care whether they can speak fluent English or not. Edited by Iversen on 17 March 2014 at 11:51pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5711 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 29 of 51 17 March 2014 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Excuse me, but ... if so many Spaniards seem unwilling to engage with you, could it not be that rather than an issue of all those people, it might be one of your attitude? How on earth would you expect a shopkeeper to react when you obviously don't understand him? Who was he to know if you weren't running an errand for somebody else? If you don't understand people talking naturally, it's not their fault for speaking their own language, it's your fault for not being able to understand *and* for not being able to communicate that you could understand them if they would just help you a bit more by slowing down their speech. And seriously, if you don't understand something as basic as a price when spoken with an accent ... Edited by Bao on 17 March 2014 at 12:59pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Martien Heptaglot Senior Member Netherlands martienvanwanrooij.n Joined 7050 days ago 134 posts - 148 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French Studies: Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Swedish, Arabic (Written) | Message 30 of 51 17 March 2014 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I asked the shopkeeper for the price in Spanish, his answer was something like seestee . Because of his bad pronunciation (it could have been 16, 60, 15 or 50) I asked him to tell me the price in Spanish which he refused. I have a slight accent in Spanish but I noticed that Spaniards usually would understand me immediately thats why I found this attitude of refusing to answer in Spanish so annoying. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4027 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 31 of 51 17 March 2014 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Parsing error Bao. Martien said the shopkeeper spoke the price in *English* which was not comprehensible to him. Martien wanted the shopkeeper to speak in native Spanish. On another note, if someone speaks in L2, and the native responds in English weaker than your L2, might it not be the case that the native wants to practice his/her English? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pierre-Emmanuel Diglot Newbie Canada learnicelandicnow.wo Joined 3852 days ago 7 posts - 14 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Icelandic | Message 32 of 51 17 March 2014 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I was in Munich last summer I went the information booth in the main train station
to ask a few questions (in German of course). The attendant answered me quickly in such heavily accented English that I though she was speaking some obscure German dialect! I just said "wie bitte?" and she immediately switched back to German. It's only after our quick exchange that I realized that she had attempted to speak English with me. Apart from that, no one tried to speak English with me, even though my German is by no means perfect. I agree that attitude matters more than actual language ability. Edited by Pierre-Emmanuel on 17 March 2014 at 2:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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