Denglisch

We did it, again. Hubby gets so mad when we are at it - mixing German with English. Haven´t done this for a long time, because there´s no need for me to keep that bit of English that survived in me alive. No more relatives I personally know in the US visiting us now, and those friends I have in NZ won´t critisise my babbling because they do not have English as their first language either. Yet daughter decided that English conversation is what she will need to improve for her practicum next autumn semester. Mercifully she decided to stay in Europe, because originally she had wanted to apply for a college place in Corea, which might have turned out extremely costly. In case Corona will miraculously go away it will be Finland for her studies. Learning Finnish is not on her agenda (way too complicated), so she´ll have to shape up her English to get along with her lectures. What we learned is that our vocabulary is insufficient, which makes fluid conversation nearly impossible. We improvised and mixed up both German and English to keep talk going. For hubby it´s either English or German. He ís a purist. Besides, he knows that the next weeks both daughter and I will tease him by often mixing English vocabulary into German phrases, a thing that gets highly criticised by him and even more by our newspapers, on a daily basis, especially by our most popular rag - the one where most journalists aren´t even able to draft articles in German without spelling mistakes aplenty. I also have taken photographing our teletext pages up and post those on FB for my friends being able to have a good laugh in such difficult times. It´s hilarious what you get to read there. I wonder who is responsible for the rubbish you will often read on the pages riddled with orthographic mistakes! Only yesterday a report got published, where teaching staff tells about the pressure practised by superior authorities to let pupils pass the final exams, pupils that aren´t able to properly read and do their maths. Teachers are practically forced to wave those through who are not in the least interested in education. Please note that Í am not writing about those who have to cope with individual problems like astigmatism or dyscalculia, but young ones who simply aren´t interested in improving their knowledge. We have a solid system of support for those who have to cope with handicaps. Yet we have no inkling how to get those others up and running the way it is supposed to be. At least English lessons had a bit of an impact on those youngsters who partcipated in the riots on New Year´s Eve. "Fuck off Police" was a commomn hearing on the tapes we got shown in the media...

Today was the first day we did not go over zero, which is quite nice, because it is winter, and winter without cold is no winter at all. Now if only there´d finally be snow...but the spider´s web looked pretty covered with frost!