Learning German is hard. We all know that. But back when I was in my first German class in 2012, I remember learning a few basics about grammar and verb conjugation, and thinking to myself, “Hey, maybe I’m making some progress! Maybe I’ll actually learn this ugly bastard!”
Oh silly little American nerd — I had no idea what I was in for. German keeps getting more and more complex the deeper you go, and unless you’ve been doing a perfect job of memorizing those godforsaken gender-based articles along the way, you will make mistakes every single time you open your yap and try to speak it.
But my wife, God bless her, has been 110% supportive the entire time. Never a discouraging word. Always telling me how great I’m doing, how I’m learning so much, and how I will become fluent someday. She’s fantastic like that. She still has to correct me when I make big mistakes, however, which is why our conversation back in May of 2012 went like this: We had just come home from a trip to the beach and were unpacking our bags, when suddenly I had to go poop really bad. Like, Red Alert bad. So I dropped the bags, pointed my finger to the sky and proudly announced:
ME: “Ich gehe zu scheißen!” (“I’m going to shit!”)
…to which my wife replied…
THE WIFE: “Good job. That is right, but it is very rude.”
You see that little green guy in the picture? He came from a Kinder Surprise egg. Kinder Surprises are chocolate eggs with plastic toys inside — most of which require assembly and utilize tiny moving parts designed specifically to block your windpipe.
They’re totally banned in the United States because of this choking hazard, and also because they’re classified as food items …yet they contain non-food objects completely hidden inside. It’s a semantic issue, really, and semantics are not cool with Americans. I mean, how can you have two labels applied to the same useless piece of shit? It’s just too much for us to handle. But as for choking hazards, my Kinder Surprise egg contained the toy pictured above — carefully contained within a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, which also contained a fold-out booklet of assembly instructions, all of which were contained within a plastic shell the size of a marshmallow. So if some kid managed to jam this entire thing is his mouth and choke to death on it, he was probably about to lick a light socket anyway.
This is my Kinder Surprise toy peeking out of a plastic plant. All day long, he’s just looking at me. Watching. Judging. It’s cute I guess, but not my idea. My German wife was cleaning our office the other day, you see, and rather than let my little toy continue to gather dust beside my computer, the way I like it, she consolidated items and invited a whole new member into our family:
“This is Carlson,” said my wife, proudly displaying her ingenuity. “He will watch over you and keep you safe while you work.”
This hideous little thing is the stuffed owl from my wife’s keychain. She named it Mechtild — a girl’s name, apparently. Mechtild is broken, of course, so for the past year she’s been sitting on my wife’s desk being useless. If you pinch her between your fingers, you can hear the beans inside crunch together. It’s creepy. I hate her.
Here we have Mechtild peeking out from another plastic plant; this one facing my wife’s side of the office. When I asked why we suddenly had two creatures hiding in our fake plants, my wife replied:
“Well, I was cleaning today and I thought it was super cute when I put Carlson in your plant. Then I got jealous and I wanted one too, so I put Mechtild in my plant, so now we both have one! …but I still like yours better. Mine is kind of ugly.”
Here are Carlson and Mechtild in action. And with that, I welcome you to the new and improved headquarters of Oh God, My Wife Is German!
2013 was a big year for The Wife and I. After living in the States together, we moved to Hannover, Germany! Now, I’ll be real honest with you: it was scary at times (there may have been tears). I dropped everything, including a house, car and job, and moved across the globe to a country in which I did not adequately speak the language. Meanwhile, my wife scrambled around finding us an apartment here in Hannover, moving everything in and launching her post-university career. Jesus Christ, I think I’m going to have a panic attack just thinking about all that stuff again. Yep. It’s on. “Honey, call the Krankenwagen; my thunderous American heart has finally given out.”
2013 was also a big year for our blog. In addition to our usual denglish posts, I began writing about life as an American expat in Germany, and the culture shock and linguistic misadventures which ensued. I also started making videos and posting pictures from our travels around Germany, which brought in a lot more new readers. We were featured on The Local and several other expat resource websites. On top of all that, one of our posts was ‘Freshly Pressed’ on WordPress.com. Our readership just exploded over the past year, and as of the writing of this post, we’re about to pass the 10,000 subscriber mark!
We would like to sincerely thank you for reading our blog and invite you to take a look at some cool information from this past year, including:
Silly Statistics
Our Most Popular Post Ever
Where Our Readers Come From
…and of course…
Our Top 5 Blog Commenters
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 320,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 14 days for that many people to see it.
Within this can resides enough explosive power to detonate your colon like a pink sock full of gunpowder.
I guess Hot Pot soup originally comes from China, but they sell the hell out of it here in Germany. And let me tell you, it absolutely lives up to its name; it is hot, spicy, and, well… it fits perfectly inside the average cooking pot. But you know how my German wife and I like to pimp our pizzas on Sunday nights? Well, we also like to pimp our soups.
We add chili peppers, mushrooms, broccoli, onions, Brussels sprouts, hamsters, gerbils — just whatever the hell we have laying around the house — and throw them all together with a can of soup to make a flavor explosion violent enough to not only damage our mouths, but destroy them entirely. And the gastrointestinal effects? Oh, they confound they senses. Have you ever passed gas so fiery-hot it seared the very lining of your anus? Have you ever generated flatulence so potent it made you see stars? We have, and we do so every time we pimp a can of Hot Pot.
So the other day, my wife noticed the mushrooms in our refrigerator were about to go bad. She sliced them up — along with some random greens, an entire onion, and several handfuls of crushed red chili peppers — and tossed them into a boiling crucible of Hot Pot soup. I was off at my German language class, so she ate a bowl and left the rest for me, along with this fantastic little note:
To clarify, the note reads: “Hi sweets, I hope you had a good class. I made soup for us — hot pot and I think it’ll burn our little butt hole! Yours more than mine! :) I love you!”
If you are familiar with our blog, you know my German wife and I like to make pizzas on Sunday nights. But we don’t actually make pizzas, we ‘pimp‘ them: We buy cheap-as-balls frozen pizzas, then add all kinds of crazy shit to make them taste fantastic.
Now, The Wife and I have different methods for pimping our pizzas. I like to go berserk and add like a pound of shredded cheese and enough salami to choke a rhino. My wife likes to add extra tomato sauce and toss a few delicate handfuls of spinach on top. She also has differing opinions of cooking methods. Namely, she prefers to leave the pizza in the oven for a mere 15 minutes, and she likes to place it on the center rack, specifically.
She is so confident in her pimping methods, she likes to remind me of their merits each and every time we stick a pizza in the oven. This is why she concluded her latest affirmation with the line:
THE WIFE: “…and remember, last time, it turned out absolutely phenomenom.”
Click here to learn more about the term “Denglish.”
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“If these guys are supposed to replace my antidepressant medication for the evening, their act better involve hurling bottles of single malt Scotch into the crowd.”
The Wise Guys are an a cappella group from the early 1990s, originally from Cologne, Germany. If you are an American, you might have heard their hit single, “Jetzt ist Sommer” (Now It’s Summer).
As a Christmas gift, my German brother-in-law bought us tickets to see the Wise Guys in Göttingen for their Antidepressivum Tour 2013. (Here’s the official promo video. It’s actually pretty cool):
It’s a cappella with iPhones! That’s just adorable.
So we went to Göttingen and saw the show, and now that I’ve been to a Wise Guys concert, I would like to make a few remarks about the experience:
It took place in a seemingly abandoned warehouse. After arriving in Göttingen, we walked into the venue and found ourselves in what appeared to be the basement from Fight Club, only much, much bigger. There were exposed I-beams in the ceiling, a cement floor, and lots of industrial-looking chains hanging all over the place. (The only things missing were pools of dried blood and a greased-up Brad Pitt.) My brother-in-law explained the building used to be a factory for making automobile components which, in turn, explained why it was so goddamn cold in there.
The smoke machines were working overtime. I can appreciate the dramatic effect smoke machines bring to a concert just as much as the next guy, but the Germans running this show took it to the next level. I could hardly see my wife walking in front of me through the haze of fog juice. I don’t know what they were pumping through those machines, but it smelled of mineral oil and felt like tepid cotton candy sifting through my lungs.
Recording videos was ‘verboten.’ As the show began, we were informed picture taking was allowed, but recording video was not. Now, I am an American, which means I was born to break the rules. (You know those old “Piracy, it’s a crime.” videos they used to play before feature films to discourage downloading pirated films? My answer was always, “Actually, Sir, I would steal a handbag.”) Anyway, as I was filming my 10th video clip of the Wise Guys, a flashlight from behind suddenly lit up my iPhone like it was on fire. A security guard had caught me. He tapped me on the shoulder, gave me an adorably reproachful look and waved his finger as if to say, “You stop that now, you naughty little American schoolboy.” I nodded, flashing my pearly whites, and resigned myself to recording videos down low, between the seats, where the Fuzz couldn’t catch me no mo.’
For Germans, a cappella music really is an antidepressant! The crowd went nuts for the Wise Guys! They were swaying from side to side, singing along and standing up and clapping. It was awesome. Everyone knew the lyrics (except for me) and they really seemed to be having a great time. Not one frown in the place, which is exceptionally rare for such a large gathering of German people. There was a palpable vibe of happiness in the air. I enjoyed being a part of it, despite the fact that I was inoculated at birth against the effects of cheesy a cappella bands.
“Don’t try and make me smile, you nerds. Ronald McDonald couldn’t pull it off and neither can you.”
After the show, The Wife and I walked to Bahnhof Göttingen and waited for the train to take us back to Hannover. I thought it would be a brilliant idea if we had beer for the ride home, so we went inside the nearest Burger King for a couple pints. (Oh yes, you can order beer just about anywhere in this beautiful country.) And as my wife was ordering from the woman behind the cash register, I reached over her shoulder in a sudden, stroke-like jerk of impulse, pointed to the big sign overhead and yelled, “–And that! We’ll take that giant bastard too.”
The result: Two beers and ‘Der Big King XXL.’
I don’t know what came over me. I hadn’t eaten fast food in over a year and a half, so I must have been overwhelmed by that gigantic golden burger looming above me like the glory of the Sun. And in that picture above, my wife is holding only the remaining half of the burger. It was bigger than her head, and so greasy and wonderful it absolutely destroyed our digestive tracts. We were both rippin’ ass the whole way home, and I’m not just talking about innocent little toots here and there; we were dropping bombs on that train. So noxious they burned our little pink balloon knots.
If you’d like to learn more about the Wise Guys, check out their website at www.wiseguys.de, and if you’d like to learn more about Der Big King XXL from Burger King, check out the website at www.burgerking.de/menu/big-king-xxl.
Would you like to experience another (fascinating) German event with us? Check out our video from the 2013 Hannover Oktoberfest.
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Germans hate travel delays. Hate them. This is because they belong to a culture in which efficiency is prized above all other aspects of society. In Germany, efficiency is king; a cold, unfeeling despot sitting atop a mountain of dead alarm clocks high above the heads of lesser priorities, such as passion, hope or basic human enjoyment of life.
For a German, it’s all about getting from point A to point B, and anything holding up this process is to be regarded with weaponized contempt. Late flights, tardy buses and delayed subway trains drive them absolutely bugshit. And traffic jams? Oh God, traffic jams will rocket their emotional state all the way from Eerily Stoic to Nuclear Wrath.
On an important side note: In German, the letter ‘J’ is pronounced like the English letter ‘Y’ (e.g. ‘John’ becomes ‘Yohn,’ and ‘Jazz’ becomes ‘Yazz.’)
This is why, back in Portland, Oregon, as my wife was attempting to drive west on I-84 during rush hour, she sent me the following photograph and angry text message:
THE WIFE: “I am today in a very bad traffic yam!”
Click here to learn more about the term “Denglish.”
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As an American expat living in Germany, I am doing my sweet almighty best to learn the German language. However, sometimes we all need a little help! One Hour Translation is a company translating German from anywhere in the world! They offer professional translation services for businesses, legal documents, websites, proofreading, transcriptions and more!
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