which is why they capitalize you instead of I.

Walk through a park in Germany on a Friday evening and you are certain to see a group of young teenagers well on their way to becoming completely intoxicated, and you will also notice that none of the adults walking by give them a second glance. That’s because Germans let their kids do things that Americans would never dream of allowing.

Germans recently decided it is a bad idea to allow cigarette vending machines available to anyone 3 feet tall or over, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see a group of kids that can barely reach the counter in their local Rewe working together as a team of 4 to struggle to carry the case of beer and pooling their money together to pay the 10 Euros for it. Although German parents aren’t particularly worried about their kids’ safety, the German government is worried about protecting its future tax base.  That is why German kids have to use car seats a few years past the age that their parents let them start drinking. “Luca, get back in your car seat, and I told you a thousand times to use the ashtray!”

Not only will kids get the opportunity to hear dirty words on the radio and see naughty body parts on regular television, but they are also reading detailed instruction on how to do things only married people should being doing in the Bravo magazine that they have been subscribing to since they turned 11.  Forget chaperons at the school dance, German teenagers are hanging out preglowing in the parking lot across from the disco so they can save enough money for the bus ride home afterwards.

German kids are allowed to go places by themselves, even riding the subways of largest cities completely unaccompanied. You don’t have bright yellow school buses with flashing lights stopping all traffic on both sides of street, school children are left to fend for themselves when they leave the campus. Some are allowed to even ride a bicycle without knee pads and a helmet.

One dramatic place where you can see German parents letting their kids do whatever they want is sports. German parents don’t stand on the sidelines screaming at their kids to kick the ball harder and run faster at the soccer game, they just let them play however they feel like. It’s despicable.

If you ever work for a big corporation in an international setting, you will be forced to endure days of seminars about inter-cultural understanding. Although these companies could save millions each year by asking their employees to just treat other people with respect, they instead pay people to make up models and graphs to stereotype the different cultures of the world.

 A typical example is the onion model of the American vs. the German coconut.  Each person keeps their innermost secrets to themselves until you have unwrapped the vegetable or fruit, respectively. The American has layers and layers to peel off, and although each layer comes off seemingly effortlessly, getting to the core of an American takes a long time. With the German on the other hand the outer shell is hard and hairy and you feel like you never make any progress breaking into the core until the day the shell suddenly breaks apart, usually while you are both drunk at the company Christmas party.

If you are an expatriate, your company may pay some overpriced consultant to explain to you the graph of how your feeling of well-being  progresses as you experience the stages of culture shock. They will tell you how happy and excited you will be in the beginning, but then how you will soon be less happy as the realities of the new setting take place, but that things will get better, and you may even enjoy your new home as much as your old home depending on whether your new home is as enjoyable as your old home, plus some other truly insightful details.

Well, times are tough now, and these useless programs are certainly easy targets for cutbacks in corporate budgets. Therefore, as a public service, Nothing For Ungood is releasing a new graph with arbitrary units as fodder for the marketing materials of these soon to be unemployed liberal arts phds:

This graph shows how smart you sound while speaking German in terms of how good your ability to speak German actually is. When you first start out in the beginner phase, you can only say things like “Ick heisse John. Ick kann sprecken Deutsch.” At this point you sound like a moron, but as your German improves to the point where you can talk about the weather, your credibility as an intelligent human sky rockets and peaks at the point where you realize that when you look up words in the German/English dictionary you shouldn’t always pick the one that sounds just like English because it shares a Latin root. Suddenly you stop saying “Ich muss etwas für die Party präparieren,” and instead replace it with ”Ich muss etwas für die Party vorbereiten,” and instantly you sound a bit dumber.

There is an inflection point, though, at the moment in which you stop just saying the words you don’t know in English and figure out ways to express yourself completely in German. This is shortly followed by realizing that some words can only be said in English without causing laughter, like when you talk about your tragbaren Rechner. Once you understand the right times to use English words the appearance of your intelligence approaches a local maximum until you grow tired of trying to pronounce things in German correctly. In the end you start sounding like a person of normal intelligence once you learn that, in German, every thought or feeling you have is best expressed in terms of pigs and sausage.

No matter how hard you work at trying to learn a new language, there will inevitably be words that you haven’t yet happened upon that you need to use in conversation.  This presents a problem for non-native speakers of English, because we create a brand new word for everything. But if German is the foreign language in question, this problem is mitigated by the fact that the German language comprises of just a few words that are squeezed together to form a specific meaning.

Maybe because of the change of weather or due to the stress of learning to live in a different culture you develop a cold sore. Instead of stopping by home to grab your German-English dictionary to look up the new term, just stop and think about what your condition is. Lip herpes. Lippenherpes. While you’re at the pharmacy you may want to pick up something for your sinuses. Don’t know the word for sinuses? That’s ok. They are kind of like caves near your nose. Nasennebenhöhlen. No problem.

Not so often in every day conversation does the word areola come up, so it is quite likely that you don’t know the German word for it. Deriving the German word is easy, though. Think about what it is. It is essentially an area on the chest where a nipple belongs, sort of a front yard for a breast wart. You got it! Brustwarzenvorhof.

For some further practice on this, here is a chart to help you master the concept of putting together basic words into specialized vocabulary:

The Germans love planning and punctuality, and they tend to scoff at our play-it-by-ear methods as juvenile, a side effect of our cowboy mentality. Germans don’t value spotaneity, they value everything running as planned. If you are ever waiting for a train in Germany and notice that it is over one minute late, you will hear at least one German denouncing the Deutsche Bahn as unreliable, despite the fact that it manages a 20,000 mile network of rail road carrying five million passengers each day with stunning efficiency. The Germans love planning so much that they even plan out their illnesses.

If you work with Germans and try to contact one who is missing from work due to an illness, his boss will tell you that he is sick until next Thursday. That’s because Germans go back to work when their doctor schedules them to be well again.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden