It’s always interesting listening to another language and hearing English sprinkled in. Newer words, like, computer, for example, are quite often universal. When I was learning German, I was surprised by how many words don’t change, but then there is the other side of the coin, the words I was surprised that do.
Like…
The German alphabet
Going back to basics, because let’s be honest, the English alphabet is a bit of a joke in that we don’t write or pronounce things phonetically. The German alphabet, on the other hand, is quite straightforward. It’s subtly different from English, but once you learn how to pronounce each letter, you can read German without flaws, without even understanding what you’re reading!
Names
I grew up among many different cultures at school, and I was quite aware that Tom, the Chinese son of immigrant parents, was not his real name. But I didn’t really grasp that different languages pronounce the same names different. For example, someone called Julian in Australia, would be pronounced Yulian in Austria. A Claudia in Austria is not Claw-dia but Cloud-ia. This was one of our considerations when choosing a baby name – I wanted a name that was almost the same in both languages. We went with Sam – simple and straightforward in English and German.
Countries
It never actually occurred to me before that countries are said differently in their native language; that the Chinese word for ‘China’ might not be simply China. Duh. In German many are quite similar – Australia is Australien. But I never realised that I would have to learn entirely new country names, and that goes down the line too – all the Austrian states have German and English names to learn, too!
Animal noises
A dog belts. A rooster kikerikis. A frog goes quark. A horse wiehert.
Of course, there are plenty that are the same like miaw and quack – it’s not all different, but I never knew there would be different noises across countries and languages!
Random noises
It turns out that every language also has different random sounds. Take, for example, an instance where you might say wow, or gosh… here you would say Oje. (Oh-yee) I also recently discovered when Sam hurt himself (not badly) and I asked him: “Did you get an owie?” And my husband piped up, “Don’t you mean ow-a?” And I was like, no, an owie!
So yeah… still finding out differences on a regular basis over here in Austria! Not sure I’ll ever run out!
an aussie in austria 