The greeting “Friendship!” (for “Freundschaft”) was taught in English class in Eastern Germany; and that was about it. But turns out, this is not enough in the capitalist vastness of America. With government money to introduce “Ossis” (Eastern Germans) to the world of the free, two friends want to make their way to San Francisco. [...]

While I realize that smallworld.ch is a Swiss initiative for better English language skills, it may as well as be addressed to inertia-laden Austrians. Of course, this is the national motion known as Gemütlichkeit among Austrianos who just don’t realize that it is a small place we are living and every once in a while one [...]

Indifference. A term every political economics student is ranting and raving about. When an individual is indifferent about option A or B, then he/she values both equally and thus considers them as good or as bad as the other.
Meh is the more casual term for it and I wish I could have “Meh” go mainstream [...]

Presented as a vid-ucate (short for video and education – now did I scare you to finish the entry?) the following video provides you with valuable lessons on body language in terms of vocabulary, grammar and semantics.
Now I’d like to give you a quick overview of my favorite non-verbal expression used on a daily basis.
“In [...]

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 [...]

I had great pleasure in editing this slang business letter (It’s linguistically captivating isn’t it?) and transform it into beautiful EBC 1 high-register kind of language. See for yourself. This is not how you want to write business letters and to be successful i simultaneously.

Leider ist die Maklersprache wissenschaftlich noch kaum erforscht. Sie dürfte sich aber doch im Euphemismus-Grad von der allgemeinen Verkäufersprache etwas abheben. Mit ein wenig Routine lassen sich Systeme erkennen: “absolute Ruhe” bezeichnet meist einen Ort, an dem einander Fuchs und Hase Gute Nacht sagen. “Lebendige Atmosphäre” in einer “aufstrebenden Gegend” könnte Stress und Baulärm bedeuten, [...]

My association with the attached picture explained as follows: “Ozapft is” is German dialect (Bavarian) for “es ist angezapft” meaning you just tapped a keg of beer. Phonetic pronunciation help should look like this: awww-ts-uh-pft-ease. Thus this is the ultimate motto for the Oktoberfest, I figured this little bit of information qualifies for a schnelles [...]