This aspect may show itself in a situation where you kindly mention to a German presenter privately after the meeting that in America, we call Umsatz revenue, and not turnover, because turnover in business terms means Fluktuation to us. Despite your decades of experience using your own language, the German will matter of factly tell you that you are wrong.

The most obvious place this defect shows up though, is in the incorrect sounds Germans make to imitate animals. Here is a sample list:

which is why you should buy every German you know Nothing For UnGood the book, which will be hitting book stores in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in November, as the optimal stocking-stuffer this Christmas. Since you will forget by then, you can go ahead and pre-order at Amazon.de or your favorite online retailer now.

The book contains the best articles from the site cleaned up and professionally translated into German, some stuff about John’s personal experiences in Germany, and more answers to questions about our translatlantic misconceptions as a service project for world harmony.

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.

 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.

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:

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.

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When the stress of trying to take care of their own leisure time needs and work place demands simultaneously gets to be too much, Germans go to a doctor to get prescribed a six week Kur, a sort of health spa retreat, where they can enjoy the benefit of having their health insurance pay for the all-inclusive resort, and their employer paying them their full salary for learning horseback riding and cooking. The best part for Germans is that these count as sick days and don’t take away any of their thirty days of vacation.

Germans are delicate and need lots of time to erholen, to sort of rejuvenate, and they need at least one vacation a year with 3 consecutive weeks to properly recoup.  This is best done in a sunny place like Greece, Turkey, Spain, or Portugal.  In America we tell each other to have fun on vacation, Germans command each other to erholen themselves well.

Germans don’t make very many babies, but the ones who do are well rewarded for leaving their employers in a precarious position. Whether they are male or female, Germans can take maternity or paternity leave for up to three years and their employers must hold a place for them, so they can waltz back into corporate life right where they left off. These poor workers can still complain though that they unfairly have to start back where they left off, having missed out on 3 years of raises and promotion opportunities.

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German McDonald’s, you need to serve biscuits. Whether or not you accept this position, you serve as our American ambassadors of goodwill in the Fatherland, and you misrepresent us each and every morning that you don’t serve biscuits. Not biscuits with butter, not biscuits with jam or jelly. You have no sausage biscuit, no bacon, egg and cheese biscuit. There are parts of America where biscuits are served with every single meal of the day, and you don’t even bother to offer them at their most needed time.

Your mother company has scientifically engineered the perfect biscuit sandwich, the McGriddle.  Process after process ensures that this masterpiece won’t disappoint. They even photolithographically etch the arches into each half and dope the substrate with maple syrup. A syrup-infused biscuit McDonald’s Germany. That’s what Germans should be having for breakfast. Not “Sweet Breakfast”, which is actually in no way sweet at all.

McDonald’s, your motto was once “One World, One Taste,” and now the Germans can’t even buy hash-browns.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden