5. DRESS SERIOUSLY

Plan made for the day? Insurances in place? Great. Good work! Now it’s time to change out of your Schlumperklamotten and head outside to face the day head on. You’re going to need to get appropriately dressed.

*WARNING! AUSLÄNDER! WARNING!* Outside is this thing called nature. Nature is fickle and not to be trusted! It dances to its own illogical, changeable tune. Best dress on the safe side. You need – expensive outdoor clothing! After all, you’re going outdoors, and it’s called outdoor clothing, therefore it must be necessary.

At all times, you should be dressed for a minimum of three seasons. Get some of those funky Jack Wolfskin shrousers: the trousers that zip off into shorts. If there is even the slightest possibility you may at some point leave a pavement, be sure you are wearing high-quality hiking boots. The Germans consider anything else an act of ankle suicide.

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6. SPEAK GERMAN

Every nation has done things it should be embarrassed about. Dark acts in its history. The Germans are no exception. You know of what I talk – the German language. Deutsch is mostly an incomprehensible jumble of exceptions. A dungeon designed to trap foreigners and hold them hostage, repeatedly flogging them with impenetrable and largely useless grammatical devices, whose only merit is to state in very, very explicit detail who has what and what is being done to whom, by whom.

The bad news is that for you to fully blend with the Germans, you’ll need to learn their language. In principle, it’s not that hard. It works in two stages: learning vocabulary and learning grammar. Learning vocabulary is fun. Most words are even similar to English thanks to our shared ancestry, so you’ll zip along for a while making great progress and really enjoying wrapping your tongue around such delights as

Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel, Haarschmuckfachgeschäft, Muckefuck and Streicheleinheiten.

Then, confident at all the little snippets you’ve already accumulated, you’ll start learning the grammar, the putty that builds your mutterings into real, coherent German sentences. This is where you’ll start to feel cheated. German grammar is nonsense.

English, at least linguistically, has always been the biggest slut in the room. Giving and taking from other languages. It tries hard to make you like it. It keeps itself simple. My pet theory is that the Germans, despite their committed efforts, were not as successful as the English in their world power plays. So, unlike German, the English language has been forced, historically, to bridge the cultural and linguistic divides that lay between us and the countries we were conquering (sorry, colonising). Over time, we’ve had to smooth down the rougher edges of English, which is a poetic way of saying kicked out all the hard bits.

English has been forced to evolve in a way that German has not. Which is why German has retained the grammatical complexity of Old English, while English got busy dumbing itself down for the masses.

Take genders as an example. Present in Old English, but long since removed to everyone’s relief. Sadly, still stubbornly present in German in the form of der, die and das, yet they’re assigned utterly arbitrarily. Sure, there are some sort of vague guidelines about how word endings can suggest the gender, and some groupings, e. g. all days of the week and all months are der. That’ll help you with maybe 30 % of nouns. This still leaves 70 % that you’ll have to learn by heart so you can decline correctly. You can also decline to learn them if you like. See what I did there? Oh, how I amuse myself. Anyway …

You’ll waste much time memorising genders (PRO TIP: never learn a noun without its article, going back later and adding them in is very time-consuming and inefficient). Yet, without knowing the gender of the nouns, you can’t accurately decline the endings of the sentences’ nouns and adjectives. Which is utterly pointless anyway and does next to nothing to increase comprehension. Without it, though, you’ll say very embarrassing things like ‹einer großer Wasser,› instead of ‹ein großes Wasser.› I know. Cringeworthy.

Of course there are far harder languages to learn than German. That’s not my point. English also has its stupidities, like its staunch commitment to unphoneticism. The difference is that English is kind enough to be easy in the beginning, then it ramps up slowly and encouragingly, with minimal grammar. German just plonks you down in front of a steep mountain, says ‹Viel Spaß,› and walks off as you begin your slow, painful ascent.

When I first started learning the language, which mostly consisted of me getting nowhere and just sitting around bitching about it, I was gently reminded by a friend that some of the smartest things ever written were authored in this language. First you need

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only to respect it, later you can learn to like it.

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7. OUTGESOURCED, DOWNGELOADED & UPGEGRADED

It’s the 15th century, and Russia is occupied by the Mongols. A peasant and his wife are out walking along a dusty road. A Mongol warrior on a horse pulls up alongside them and tells the Russian peasant he will now have sex with the Russian’s wife, while he is forced to watch. But, since there is a lot of dust on the ground, the Mongol tells the Russian that he must hold his balls throughout so that they do not get dirty. Once the Mongol warrior has finished, he returns to his horse and rides away. The Russian man’s wife is understandably distraught. She sits weeping, while the Russian peasant starts laughing and jumping around with joy. His surprised wife asks, ‹How can you be jumping with joy after what just happened?› The peasant answers ‹Oh, but it is I who had the last laugh, for his balls are now covered in dust!›

I think of this parable when I hear Germans use words like upgraden, getoastet, outgesourced and downgeloaded. Most Germans I know are fiercely protective of the German language. As if it were a flightless bird left to flounder amongst a pack of linguistic lions or a fragile egg that must be carefully protected from the onslaught of spatula-shaped Anglicisms. The kind of Anglicisms used by lazy marketers who want to make their slogans and marketing spiel that bit more exotic by peppering in some funny, foreign, mostly English jargon. I think this fear is a justified one. Languages have always borrowed from each other, but in future English, like a particularly enthusiastic team player, will give many more words to other languages than it takes from them, due to its position as the lingua franca.

But, my dear beloved Germans, when I catch you using words like outgesourced or downgeloaded, my heart sinks. Not only are you using the exact English word and spelling when you have perfectly good German equivalents, but you’re even going to the length of adding the English grammatical affix -ed to change the tense, which is not part of the German language. So now we’ve got an English word, English spelling, English grammar, but then, like an awkward final act of language patriotism, you’ve slapped the totally unnecessary German ge- prefix into the middle.

At these times, I’m reminded of that Russian, celebrating the smallest of victories in the face of an already lost war. ‹Oh, but it is the German language that’s had the last laugh, for it has got a ge- in the middle!›

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