Advent Calendar Day 5
Day 5 of our Advent Calendar has been written by Pam. Thank you, Pam!
Hi my name is Pam Jones and I work at Apetito. I have always wanted to learn German and was fortunate enough to do a one year crash course to “O” level standard many years ago. Since that time, however, I have not had any opportunity to use it and had forgotten almost all that I had learned. However my role at apetito necessitates travel to Germany, where our parent company is based, and when the opportunity arose to have German lessons I jumped at the chance – for me it is common courtesy to speak (or to attempt to speak) to people in their native language if at all possible .
I have been having lessons for 18 months now and am able to converse with people when I travel to Germany. Whilst most of my business colleagues speak English fluently and return my attempts to speak German with English answers, I have found it extremely useful whilst travelling. Not everyone speaks English in Germany and I have used it on many occasions to check train information such as platform changes as well as purchasing tickets from the ticket machines to ordering food in restaurants, and speaking to taxi drivers to ensure that I end up at the right destination.
“Not everyone speaks English in Germany”
I’m glad you’re saying this. Although a LOT of Germans speak English, there are also a lot of people who don’t, and if they are taxi drivers, who have to get you from A to B, then some language knowledge is extremely useful.Glad, you managed to get your message across!
Brilliant … and it must be handy to know how to say to a taxi driver, in German, “Oi, by the way I want to go straight there, and not via the 2 hour scenic route!”
But these are German taxi drivers – they do drive directly from A to B, and not via the scenic route ;-)))