Re: THE RANT THREAD!
The colloquialism thing can work both ways as well. People DO use them (probably especially here in Berlin), because there are a lot of English speaking people living here, and there are also cinemas that show movies in English, and they pick them up. It can be really hard to explain to them that you can't write like that. I don't know why; written German and spoken German are drastically different, so it shouldn't be a new concept. I also find that they'll do things that -are- correct, but awkward, like using "too" instead of "also" or "as well", and they don't want to let go of that.
It's not just language schools that give you little space to be creative...it's a general problem (yes, I think it's a problem) in German culture. They're not comfortable with things that go "outside of the box", and in the 21st century, things change too much. I think, unless Germans learn to adapt, we might see some cracks start to show over here. It can be really frustrating in an international office. They'll pride themselves on their international team, but they'll make ZERO effort to consider the fact that people from different countries work in different ways. At my last job, the English team often tried to find ways of making boring, repetitive tasks fun. For example, one time, we played a battleship game where every time we got to a certain amount of the boring work we were doing, we got to make a battleship guess. Our German managers HATED this; they just couldn't understand how we couldn't repetitively boring task all day for several days, and why we had to make it "fun". They told us to stop it, and as a result saw our productivity drop, then complained about it. Ugh. Working in marketing jobs can be very frustrating as well, because they have NO IDEA who their target demographic is a lot of the time. They have a lot of trouble understanding that, if their target demographic is 30-something professionals, how those may differ between when they were that age, and how those people can differ between countries. They'll describe this person, and they'll be describing a German 33-year-old ten years ago, not a German 33-year-old now, or especially an American 33-year-old.
This BAFFLES me in Berlin, because it's a place that has seen drastic change over the past 60 years on a continual basis. I sometimes wonder if they just got stuck? Or that this element of German culture is so strong that it's hard to get rid of?
Originally posted by Jembru
View Post
It's not just language schools that give you little space to be creative...it's a general problem (yes, I think it's a problem) in German culture. They're not comfortable with things that go "outside of the box", and in the 21st century, things change too much. I think, unless Germans learn to adapt, we might see some cracks start to show over here. It can be really frustrating in an international office. They'll pride themselves on their international team, but they'll make ZERO effort to consider the fact that people from different countries work in different ways. At my last job, the English team often tried to find ways of making boring, repetitive tasks fun. For example, one time, we played a battleship game where every time we got to a certain amount of the boring work we were doing, we got to make a battleship guess. Our German managers HATED this; they just couldn't understand how we couldn't repetitively boring task all day for several days, and why we had to make it "fun". They told us to stop it, and as a result saw our productivity drop, then complained about it. Ugh. Working in marketing jobs can be very frustrating as well, because they have NO IDEA who their target demographic is a lot of the time. They have a lot of trouble understanding that, if their target demographic is 30-something professionals, how those may differ between when they were that age, and how those people can differ between countries. They'll describe this person, and they'll be describing a German 33-year-old ten years ago, not a German 33-year-old now, or especially an American 33-year-old.
This BAFFLES me in Berlin, because it's a place that has seen drastic change over the past 60 years on a continual basis. I sometimes wonder if they just got stuck? Or that this element of German culture is so strong that it's hard to get rid of?
Comment