Well, I finally got back to Rosetta Stone German today. I had started it last spring and was working on it fairly diligently until life intervened - including Mom breaking her hip and me having to fly up to Canada to get her settled into a retirement home. I was afraid that I might have forgotten everything but didn't do too badly on the review today.
Which brings us to the signs in our apartment building.
There's something really odd in German called a dative case - maybe this sign and others like it will help me figure it out!
I love the sign below. Maybe there's no fire department in Zurich?
I bought a keyboard. In the US they're called QWERTY because that's the way the keys are lined up. Well, I couldn't find one of those so I got the European QWERTZ and figured that would be good because I just had to remember that y was z and z was y and it had the special characters needed in German like the a with two dots over it. Wouldn't you know it - my computer recognizes this new keyboard as an American one so now z is y and y is z and the exclamation point and other symbols are all messed up so I have to keep looking at my laptop keyboard to figure them out. Arrrrr! Maybe I can get the kids to send me one from Florida and I'll leave this one lying about so people will think I've gone European in my techno skills.
I don't have a good ear for languages but I'm determined to learn enough German that I can get around without having to continue asking everyone "Sprechen Sie English?" Learning German is hard enough but there's an added quirk. People in this part of Switzerland speak a dialect of German called "Swiss German". There's no Rosetta Stone for it. I guess it's like the French spoken in Quebec. Before we moved here, we were assured that "everyone" in Zurich spoke English. Nope. Many do but everyone here is so friendly and helpful that we seem to manage with gestures and a few words of English and German.
I gotta tell you, people ... I'm loving it here!
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