And then I went to the Ohrenarzt

Spotlight Autorin DAGMAR TAYLOR lebt gerne in Deutschland – gäbe es da bloß nicht so viele sprachliche und kulturelle Hürden zu überwinden.

A humorous look at adjusting to life in Germany

MEDIUM AUDIO

AGerman doctor once told an English friend of mine, “Bitte kommen Sie nüchtern zum Termin.” My friend was furious. “Ich würde nie besoffen zum Arzt gehen,” she said in her best German. The linguistic and cultural misunderstandings between German and English are an almost endless source of amusement. After around 20 years in Germany, I have come across plenty of these. Here, in no particular order, are four everyday topics that, I find, can create confusion and embarrassment for English speakers in German-speaking countries.

The genuine article

When I began learning German at secondary school at the age of 11, I doubted the need for articles. What, I thought, was the necessity for so many varieties of the definite article, when in English, we happily make do with one: “the”?

Why is it das Sofa, but die Couch, when, at the end of the day, we’re talking about the same piece of furniture? And why is a girl das Mädchen? I know that nouns ending in the diminutive suffix -chen all take das — and believe me, I hold on to rules like this in the land of random article distribution — but why is a girl an “it”, while a sausage is a “she”?

It would make sense if different articles were used to help people like me understand the meaning of words that have a number of meanings, such as die Bank (the bank) and die Bank (the bench). But, no, not even the Stuhl you sit on and the Stuhl you sit down for have different articles.

Don’t get me started on declension either. It’s bad enough that nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter, but that the article changes after certain prepositions, or depending on whether they’re the object or the subject in the sentence, is just too much.

At school, having a solution that said “one article fits every situation” seemed the right way to go. Being quite polite at the age of 11, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to point out that the Germans had got it wrong, and that they needed to consider reducing their melange of different articles to one definite article, das, and one indefinite article, ein. I quietly decided for myself that I would simply ignore the articles when I was learning vocabulary. Perhaps the Germans would catch up with my pragmatism at some point.

Back then, I had no idea that I would be spending most of the rest of my days in Germany. After studying German at university, I might have guessed that the language was going to be part of my life in one way or another. Yet I think I still believed that I was going to pick up the articles by osmosis. That assumption clearly wasn’t realistic.

When I arrived in Germany “for good”, I suddenly became embarrassed at the thought of getting an article wrong in conversation. Obviously I knew some articles and felt quite confident when I was talking about das Haus or das Auto, but if the topic turned to something more complex, my only option was to fall silent, or, worse still, to cough while saying the article, so as to hide the fact that I had no idea whether it was der, die or das. It went like this: “Kannst du mir bitte (cough) Salz reichen?” After trying this out a few times, I decided that it was even more embarrassing than just admitting I was clueless and asking what the hell the article was. So I did that sometimes, but it didn’t help the flow of conversation.

Sometimes, I just listed all the articles as if I were doing some sort of oral multiple-choice test: “Es tut mir Leid, aber ich finde den / die / das Zettel nicht mehr.” This clearly wasn’t a good solution either.

Once, at the English school where I was working, a new student introduced himself to me in German: “Hallo! Ich bin der Wolfgang.”

“Hallo!” I replied, all smiles. “Ich bin der Dagmar.” As soon as I said it, I realized my mistake and turned bright red. I couldn’t even say my name properly, and you don’t actually need articles with names, even if it is common usage in the dialectal madness of southern Germany. But that’s a completely different story.

This won’t hurt at all

In Germany, a general practitioner, or Arzt für Allgemeinmedizin, or Hausarzt, is sometimes no more than a frustrating hurdle on your way to the specialist you really want to see. As long as you know which part of your body is not working, it’s quite simple. If there’s something wrong with your ear, you go to the ear doctor

(Ohrenarzt); if there’s something wrong with your skin, you go to the skin doctor (Hautarzt); and if there’s something wrong with your Kind, you take him or her to the Kinderarzt.

Most Germans are very open about their ailments and afflictions. Many take the question, “How are you?” quite literally; and if they’re not feeling one hundred per cent fit, be prepared to hear all about it. In contrast to most Brits, they’re not squeamish about using very direct language. A person who has diarrhoea, for example, might tell you just that and won’t necessarily spare you the mental imagery by saying: “I’ve got an upset tummy.”

Some medicines also carry very straightforward names. No prizes for guessing that the Anti-baby-pille is the contraceptive pill. If you’ve got a cold, you might want to go to the chemist and ask for a decongestant, or Schleimlöser — a “slime loosener”. Lovely!

English employs many Latin words in medicine. German words can seem very simple in comparison. At the gynaecologist, for example, pregnant women will hear about their Eierstöcke (ovaries), Mutterkuchen (placenta) and Fruchtwasser (amniotic fluid). “Egg sticks”, “mother cake” and “fruit water” sound more like a meal than a medical examination.

Once, when I was at the Internist, a doctor for internal medicine, I was waiting patiently in the half-empty waiting room, looking round at the 20 or so white cantilever chairs, placed neatly against three walls, when the doctor came out of his consulting room with the patient he had been treating, and told her in a loud voice that she should bring a stool with her next time. I looked round at the empty chairs. Then I realized that he meant another sort of stool.

In Britain, this sort of conversation takes place behind closed doors and in hushed tones. I expect doctors to be discreet, which is why I assumed that the doctor was talking about chairs. Of course, it’s all natural, but still, we don’t all want to have our symptoms shared with strangers.

Flipping peanuts

In the UK, at least in the 1970s before the arrival of Jamie Oliver and quinoa, crisps were a much-loved snack in kids’ lives. They came in large family-size bags, as they do in Germany, but they also came in useful, single-portion bags. Most children ate a bag of crisps as their playtime snack at school. They were salty, greasy and delicious, and filled you up until lunchtime.

Crisps come in all sorts of flavours in Britain, the most popular of which are ready salted, salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, and prawn cocktail. A prawn cocktail was a popular starter in the 1960s and 1970s and can still be found on menus in more traditional restaurants. It consists of cooked, shelled prawns in a sauce made with a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise. It’s usually served on a bed of iceberg lettuce in a glass sundae dish. A weird flavour for crisps? No, they taste like ketchup, but have a vague whiff of fish about them.

Then there are the more exotic crisps, in wonderful shapes, like Cheesy Wotsits, Hula Hoops or Monster Munch — baked corn snacks in the form of monsters, with flavours like pickled onion or roast beef.

The first time I went shopping for crisps in Germany, I found it hard to believe that they came only in big bags and that there was only one flavour: paprika. I spent ages looking for the salt-and-vinegar crisps — and then dreaming of them. Paprika’s OK, but sometimes, only a packet with salt and vinegar will do. It wasn’t as if there were just the sliced-potato kind of crisps either. There were paprika-flavoured potato hoops, paprika-flavoured potato sticks and even paprika-flavoured kangaroos. But just paprika!

There was, however, a different type of snack that wasn’t paprika-flavoured: the Erdnuss Flip. I was quite excited to try this. From the picture on the packet, I could see that they came in the same shape as Cheesy Wotsits, of which I had only fond memories. And I love peanuts. They’re crunchy and salty and moreish. Erdnuss Flips are none of these. I was very

“We don’t all want to have our symptoms shared”

disappointed. They are edible, but very bland, and if you’re not careful, they dissolve on your tongue, leaving you with a mouthful of slime.

Things have changed in the 20 years that I’ve lived here, and Germany has opened its supermarket doors to other flavours of crisps, like salt and black pepper and even salt and vinegar — though I’m still on the lookout for a bag of prawnand-cocktail flavoured crisps.

Big business

My first trip to Germany was at the age of 14. I was sent to stay with my great-aunt in Trier over the summer. We had never met, and she didn’t speak any English. But I had had three years of school German, and I had a tiny, ancient dictionary that my mother had won in a raffle. What could go wrong?

One day, over a lunch of spinach, boiled potatoes and omelette, my aunt asked me whether I had done a großes Geschäft. I didn’t know what she was talking about, and for some reason, she didn’t bother to do any miming. So I just kept smiling, and saying, “Es tut mir leid. Ich verstehe nicht.”

I looked up Geschäft in my dictionary and it said “shop; business”. Had I done a big shop? A big business? That didn’t really make much sense. Even if I had understood that my great-aunt was asking me about my bowel movements over lunch, it was just strange.

Euphemisms for this activity had not turned up in any of my German lessons. Hans and Lieselotte, the characters in our German book, Vorwärts 1, went plenty of places, but they never went to the toilet. When I did finally guess what she was perhaps asking about, other questions surfaced. What if I answered “yes”? Then she would want to know all about my wares. And how embarrassing if I had to admit I had thought she was talking about poo, when she was actually talking about something completely different.

When a huge basket of nectarines appeared a few days later, and I was told to eat them, I knew for certain that my lovely aunt had been concerned for my health.