If you move to Germany, it may be a little difficult to break the ice and make new friends, so the best way to accomplish this is to throw a party for all of your acquaintances.
 
Planning
Plan ahead at least 2 months. Inform neighbors that it may be loud, and give a polite invitation to your next-door neighbors to join in.
 
Food
If you are female you are expected to prepare something hot and at least 4 types of salad, plus have snacks available at all times. If you are male then you need to provide at least salty sticks. Anything extra is going above and beyond the call of duty, and as a male you will receive great praise for your efforts.
 
Drink
You can tell your friends to each bring a bottle (especially good for birthday parties as a substitute for presents), or you can be a hero and supply everything yourself.  If you are female you need to make Bowle, unless it´s Christmas time, then you have to make Glühwein or you need to find a man to make your Bowle into the Feuerzangen variety. 
 
Decorations
Males over 30 are only required to find some beer garden style benches to set the ambiance. Women are required to make sure that the ratio of male to female attendees is roughly equal and to make the party setting pretty.
 
Setting the mood
The most important thing to Germans is what they call the Stimmung, or the general feel-good atmosphere of the party. There won’t ever be any Stimmung before 10 pm, and if there isn’t any Stimmung by 11 pm, then there never will be any, and your party will be deemed a flop, a waste of a good Friday or Saturday evening for all involved.
 
The critical element to creating the Stimmung is the music selection. Building the Stimmung is a delicate process of leading up to the general acceptance of terrible old German music. If you begin the evening playing German Schlager, no one will stay for your party, but if you don’t end the party playing German Schlager, your party is considered a failure.  In America you often want to impress your friends by playing music from bands that they haven’t heard of before, the opposite is true in Germany, you want to only play music that they know by heart.
 
Begin with the current top 40 music as a light background of familiarity and comfort while people get to know each other and can move from the safe topics of soccer, weather, and how stupid Americans are into more interesting conversations. When you notice that people have loosened up a bit, proceed with more classic rock like Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams and hits such as the Summer of ‘69, which will help people get into that happy nostalgic feeling of reminiscing about how much fun they had back when they were a teenager, even if they are only 23.
 
Now that you have given people a taste of the imminent Stimmung, you need to pull it back a bit and play some darker music to add in some energy but also a bit of aggression. Your guests might enjoy a harder song or two, but soon they will demand new music to lighten up the mood, which gives you the chance to inject the dance music into the party, which will be greeted with universal enthusiasm causing the more outgoing guests to rush to the dance floor and get the grooving started.
 
This is a critical milestone, because no dancing means no Schlager. If you fail to accomplish this, you can give up now and recommend moving the party to a disco where a professional DJ has done the job correctly. However, if you have accomplished this, sigh a breath of relief, it´s time to finally enjoy everyone enjoying themselves. During the dance hits phase you must include either “Walking on Sunshine”  or “It’s Raining Men”. This phase should last about half an hour which leads directly into the moment every German has been waiting for, the chance to hear the same songs they’ve heard at every other party and every single night at the disco, the German Schlager. You must have at least the following tracks on hand:

• Schön ist es auf der Welt zu sein
• Moskau
• Ein Bisschen Spass muss sein
• Griechischer Wein
• The complete works of Dieter Thomas Kuhn
• Ti Amo
• Major Tom
• Er hat ein knallrotes Gummibot
• Die Hände zum Himmel
• Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht
• Flieger grüß mir die Sonne
• Auf der Reeperbahn (only required north of the Weisswurstäquator)
• Er gehört zu mir
• Westerland
   

Other popular ones, but which are optional:

• Im Wagen vor mir
• Skandal im Sperrbezirk
• 10 Kleine Jägermeister or something from the Ärzte
• Aber bitte mit Sahne
• Pure Lust am Leben
• Der Kommisar
• Verlieben, verloren, vergessen, verzeih’n
   

When you are ready for your guests to leave, you should play Time to Say Goodbye, My Way, or Sierra Madre,  so that they know that the party is over and they should either go home or find a corner to pass out in. Generally, you know whether you have attained the Stimmung, but if on the next day you aren’t sure, a definite indicator is if a guest wakes up on the floor in the morning singing Eisgekühlter Bommerlunder or anything by the Flippers.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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