100% of German men carry a purse as part of their wallet, in which they put their coins.  Although this coin purse is a very handy feature of a wallet, be prepared for your American friends to make fun of your lacking manhood upon your return to the States for being a purse-carrying pansy. Real American men apparently always say “keep the change”, or at least use their debit cards to avoid the jing-a-ling. Enjoy your coin purse while in Europe, but be ready for holes in your pockets again after moving back.

Since Germany is a mostly cash based society that hates customer service, a coin purse can be quite useful when paying for something, because the cashier usually demands that you dig out some combination of coins, so that she doesn’t have to make as much change for you. Since Europeans decided to make their coins into categories of nearly equal size,  shape, and color, you won’t be able to sort out the correct coins very quickly as 2 cents and 5 cents look basically identical.  The 10 cent coin and 20 cent coin are also indistinguishable to the untrained eye, so trying to quickly sort through your coins to appease the cashier who doesn’t want to bothered with this task (although her coins are already sorted), while trying to keep things moving in the fast growing line of impatient shoppers isn’t really an experience you want to go through with. But having an empty coin purse to flash to the cashier to let her know that today she has to do her job is quite practical.

What the Germans almost never do is wear their cell phone on their belts. It makes it difficult to tell who is an important person in Germany, since no one is seen with a PDA,  pager,  work phone, and personal cell phone tethered to their waist, as a badge of their limitless availability to TCB.  Maybe having a coin purse frees up a pocket for the Handy.

Languages are quite arbitrary things.  In languages there really are no absolutes. Nothing is set in stone, and all attempts to define rules that fit people’s usage of them inevitably come up short.

Standards for languages are created by declaring one region’s dialect the “official” version of the language at some moment in time, and the rules of the language are continually modified to meet the changing speech patterns of the language’s users.  There is no right or wrong in language.

The United States and Great Britain are often referred to as two nations divided by a common language. For a foreigner learning English then, they have two major options in learning the language: learn British English or American English. While there is no “linguistically correct” language, there is a correct choice, and Germans always choose the wrong answer.

Purely from an unbiased standpoint,  Germans should learn American English in school for a multitude of reasons. If a German were to watch the undubbed version of a movie, 9 times out of 10,  that movie would feature actors with American accents,  and the same goes for television. It just doesn’t make any sense to watch a movie about high school and then talk about your upcoming “A levels”.

A German is 5 times more likely to come into contact with an American than someone from Great Britain if the two people are picked up randomly from the planet and dropped into the same bucket.

In 2006 the GDP of Great Britain was $1.93 trillion, a paltry sum in comparison to the $13.13 trillion of the US.  A German is more likely to be doing business with an American company than a British company.

A tourist in Germany is more likely to have come from the United States than from Great Britain. It would seem that the proximity to Great Britain would encourage British tourism in Germany, but the British also need to spend their vacation in some place sunny like Portugal. Plus they already have old stuff to look at at home.

If a German is going to visit long lost relatives whose ancestors emmigrated to an English speaking country, or vice versa, then those relatives will almost certainly be speaking with an American dialect.

It would seem like a good idea to go to the source for a language, but then Germans would just be learning German, when they actually want to learn English, and that doesn’t make any sense. So Germans instead learn what they refer to as “Oxford English”.

In theory there is nothing wrong with learning England’s version of English, just like there is nothing wrong with learning that Swiss language Rhaeto-Romanic . It can be done, but it is just not a worthwhile pursuit. English is the world language because of America, not because of England, so it only makes sense to learn America’s version.

In German schools you will receive bad marks for speaking with an American accent or using American spelling if you picked it up during your high school year in the States. Instead you should be receiving bonus points for learning the standards of a world economic and cultural super power. Mickey Mouse doesn’t speak with a British accent.

Any German reading this article will completely disagree with me,  but it won’t be a bag of crisps that they are munching on whilst reading.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden

Here at Nothing For Ungood, we are pleased to announce the release of our first game, Trans-Atlantic Tic Tac Toe:

The rules of Tic Tac Toe are following:
Connect three of your pieces in a row (vertical, horizontal, or diagonal) to win. If neither of the two players achieves this before the 9 spaces are filled, the game ends in a tie called a cat’s game. You must play against the computer who is only half-witted. So if you are at least half-witted as well, you can beat the computer.

This Flash file is about 2 MB, so please be patient as it loads. And yes, that is a ridiculously large file size for a game as trivial as Tic Tac Toe.If you want to embed this game into your own website, here is the code.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden

Germans will tell you that Americans don’t know how to make bread, but their tragic flaw is much worse; Germans don’t know how to make sandwiches.

Germans have over the years learned to eat hamburgers and will even franchise American hamburger chains to garner access to our precious burger recipes. And now Germany even features that most mediocre of fast food franchises, Subway, because Germans are desperately seeking to acquire the key knowledge required to create deli treats.

Since there is really no reason to withhold the essential elements from them, please feel free to share with your German friends the secrets of our sandwich success. It really only boils down to two main aspects:

1. Sandwiches consist of a minimum of two layers of bread.  While the norm is 2, a more daring club sandwich features 3 layers of bread. Germans often make their sandwiches with only one layer of bread. This is incorrect.
2. Sandwiches are comprised of meat and cheese.While there are many notable exceptions to this rule, no sandwich has ever been made in Germany with meat and cheese at the same time. It’s almost as if Germans treat cheese as were it its own category of meat, worthy of a sandwich on its own. The only acceptable cheese-only sandwich is the grilled cheese sandwich, which doesn’t exist in Germany.

There is one thing Germans do well, which is to universally incorporate cucumbers into their sandwich attempts. That is about the only thing we have to learn from the Germans, aside from how to build cars.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden

As long as they decide on what it will be before they hit puberty.

Germans believe in creating optimized social systems, and that includes their educational system. In America we lump almost all students together through high school, where the biggest concerns are winning sports championships and finding a good-looking classmate to take to the prom. In every high school in America, you will have kids toiling away in an effort to be accepted into one of the most prestigious universities in the world studying along side kids who are nearly smart enough to become janitors one day.

In Germany, on the other hand, these kids would have long been segregated into 3 different types of schools.  So when German kids grow so old that they have to start writing their age with two digits, they need to begin worrying about their future career, because they are about to be branched off into either a school that will teach them what they need to know to become a doctor or a school to help them become a plumber.

Germans are remarkably inflexible in changing careers, whereas Americans don’t seem to have much of a problem redefining themselves whenever market conditions will reward this behavior. In Germany you can study to become a waiter for three years, whereas in America this process takes about 1 shift. So if your career is important to you in Germany, you need to make the right decision early, because switching later will be nearly impossible. The difference in your education and occupation can have far reaching consequences on your socioeconomic status in Germany, and will likely be the sole determining factor of whether you live life as a lower-middle class or mid-middle class citizen. (Essentially whether you will drive a Twingo or a Mercedes).

The dual-system as they call it in Germany is equivalent to our system of vo-techs and college drop-outs.  In Germany those less interested in academics are funneled out of theoretical learning and into practical training at an early age. The nerds are stuck with one extra year of high school, but with the benefit of not having to share school grounds with the flunkies for the final years of their secondary education.

Whereas we tell our teenagers they can be anything they want to be and let them fail at attaining their dreams in college, Germans avoid these wasted 12 to 18 months of misguided educational efforts and instead replace them with an equivalent amount of wasted time in mandatory armed forces service.

In the end you have Americans that aren’t really experts at anything but still believe they can do everything, and Germans who are extreme specialists in their area but are reluctant to do anything outside their immediate job description.

Both systems have their charm, but the correct system is the American one, because it has inspired dozens of films of international acclaim revolving around high school, whereas there has never been a major motion picture about the German Gymnasium.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden