![\"Flag](\"http:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/500px-Flag_of_Saxony.png\" "\\"Flag_of_Saxony\\"")
<\/a>I got some odd looks today for using the local dialect’s way of phrasing the time.\u00a0 But I don’t care for Standard German and don’t think I should be expected to use it.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n I have to go back a few years first.\u00a0 I started learning German in 2004.\u00a0 Most of it I learned at the Goethe Institute in Jerusalem and on my visits to Germany.\u00a0 I learned very quickly, and by the time I moved here in 2007, I spoke fluently, but with a bunch of mistakes.<\/p>\n Since then my accent has improved \u2013 Germans don’t immediately notice I’m a foreigner \u2013 and I’ve learned to make less obvious mistakes and to speak more naturally. \u00a0People often tell me how great my German is, but it’s my understanding that people are wrong in making language learning out to be some high intellectual achievement to be praised and awed at.<\/p>\n I’m pretty sure the reason I learned German so quickly is first, I grew up a bilingual (English+Hebrew,) giving me an unfair head-start on language-learning, and second, I managed to experience a lot of total immersion in a very short time by visiting Germany for weeks at a time and by hearing German-language music (yes, it was<\/em>\u00a0mainly Rammstein.\u00a0 Excellent for learners, very clear singing!)<\/p>\n Anyway, I’ve tried to learn a few language since, and I’ve never been quite as successful as I was with German, although I’ve picked up useful learning habits. \u00a0(Pro-tip<\/em>: just speak, even if you hardly know any words and grammar. \u00a0Speaking badly is the only<\/em> way you will ever learn to speak well!)<\/p>\n The situation with the standard language, in Germany as in most places in Europe, is this: there’s a more-or-less official standard language, and people are expected to use it in formal situations.\u00a0 Every region \u2013 down to the town level \u2013 has its own variant of German, some dialects being close to Standard German\u00a0(called\u00a0Hochdeutsch<\/em>, “high German”) and some very different from it.\u00a0 There are also some new urban dialects created by contact with immigrant languages.<\/p>\n Schools teach Hochdeutsch as the One True German and penalize children for speaking German the way people actually speak it at home.\u00a0 Adults\u00a0are often judged, consciously or unconsciously, on their ability or inability to speak Standard German, with certain dialects having an especially bad reputation.<\/p>\n The basic reason people tend to use a standard language or language variety and consider it important is that it gives them access to a broader range of people to communicate with, because it’s not specific to one place.\u00a0 This can be very important if you’re in politics, business, or academe \u2013 incidentally the areas where the standard language is most important.<\/p>\n The way I learned German is mainly by speaking and hearing it and trying to imitate what I heard.\u00a0 I quickly forgot most of what I learned in German class and started operating on intuition.\u00a0 After moving to Leipzig, I grew to really like the local dialect (a variety of Upper Saxon \u2013 the best<\/em>\u00a0variety, that is) and started consciously learning to speak it.<\/p>\n At some point, pretty early in my living here, I was already able to have complex discussions in Hochdeutsch, so long as they were about education, but for lack of practice, I was no good at casual conversation.\u00a0 So I started applying myself to learning how people who live here talk in normal social situations, and this made my German even more S\u00e4cksch <\/em>(that’s pronounced [zecksh] or [zeggsh], and it’s how we call Upper Saxon, which in Hochdeutsch they call S\u00e4chsisch<\/em>, pronounced [zeck<\/strong>\u25cfsish]).\u00a01<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Now, S\u00e4cksch is, if not the<\/em> least-liked German dialect, then one of them, and it has a very recognizable accent which anyone who lives here for a while learns to love.\u00a0 What’s more, it’s strongly associated with the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a.k.a “Communist East Germany”.<\/p>\n One noticable thing about S\u00e4cksch \u2013 together with many other variants of German \u2013 is the way we phrase the time.\u00a0 8:15pm is f\u00f6rdl neun<\/em>, pronounced approximately [fur<\/strong>\u25cfdl noyn], meaning ‘a quarter of nine’.\u00a0 8:45 would be dreif\u00f6rdl neun, <\/em>[dry<\/strong>\u25cffur\u25cfdl noyn], ‘three-quarters nine’.<\/p>\n This is extremely confusing if you’re used to saying\u00a0viertel nach acht<\/em>\u00a0and viertel vor neun<\/em>, i.e.\u00a0 ‘a quarter after eight’ and ‘a quarter before nine’, respectively, as in Hochdeutsch.\u00a0 But it’s the way I’ve come to speak, without having to think about it, and I speak this way because it’s the most effective way for me to communicate with the people around me.\u00a0 It signals my familiarity with the language and my control of its subtleties in a way that’s literally impossible in pure Standard German, simply because every native speaker has a bit of their own dialect.<\/p>\n But most of all, it’s the way I speak,<\/em> and I’m not about to learn some sterile, artificial version of German on top of the one I already speak just to accommodate people who aren’t familiar with S\u00e4cksch. \u00a0Due to the dominance of Hochdeutsch, it’s not even really S\u00e4cksch anymore, just Hochdeutsch with bit of an accent and some occasional regional word. \u00a0Students who move to Leipzig for the low cost of living and nearly-free education should learn to speak the language here, and as for foreigners like me, learning to speak the way locals do is the most natural and reasonable thing we could do \u2013 even if native speakers think it’s funny.<\/p>\n I got some odd looks today for using the local dialect’s way of phrasing the time. But I don’t care for Standard German and don’t think I should be expected to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2086,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[472,467,473,64,460,469,66,462,471,583,470,468,104,463,465,464,461,466],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2062"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2424,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062\/revisions\/2424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}High German, Upper Saxon<\/h3>\n
Dry Furdl<\/em>!<\/h3>\n
<\/div>\nFootnotes<\/h3>\n
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