Suaheli please …

… well the title may seem a bit confusing, but when you read it you will understand. We thought it would be nice to write a post in english for all our not-german-speaking friends and what topic is better than language for that?

In our hostel we have a lot of people from all over the world: Argentina, England, Ireland, France and Israel, some native speakers and many people from the islands Tonga, Kiribati, Samoa and Vanuatu. So there are a lot of languages spoken and sometimes it can be confusing. Anna from France (always called “French Anna”) always tries to remind everybody that we should speak English when we are in a group, so everybody understands what the others talk about. So she always says: “Guys! English please!”. Anibal from Argentina started to tell people stuff like “Guys! Suaheli please!” or Jozef from England sais: “Chinese please” just to make fun of French Anna. So that’s where our title comes from….

It is really interesting to see or better to hear how the different languages sound like. When Nadav, he is from Israel, speaks in Hebrew, it is hardly possible for us to recognize single words. He currently lives with two German girls in one room and they made the rule that when they are in the room together they all shall only speak English. That does not really work out, so sometimes the girls speak German and Nadav starts singing in Hebrew. This is actually the perfect spot for Heiko’s favorite pun these days:

How did the Isreali guy get his beer? He-brew it!

Apart from Heiko trying to be funny, we always try to teach each other some words in the different languages, but we learned that some sounds are really really hard to teach and/or learn. The best example might be the “h”: as French Anna remarked one evening, English people are “happy”, French people are “appy” and Spanish speaking people are “chappy”! But even native speakers can’t agree on one pronounciation. We discovered that people from Ireland don’t pronounce a “th” they just say the word with a “t” in the beginning. So why do we have to learn pronouncing a “th” in school, if we could as well just learn “Irish English”? By the way … “David, what comes after the lightning?” – “Tunder!” 😀

So you see we learn a lot every day and it is really funny to discover the little quirky things about our languages.

Finally some pictures of some of the people over here (only the ones we have pictures of right now):

Anna & Tanguy:
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Jozef (left) and Nadav (right):

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Anibal:

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Nadav again, proud to have a phone again:

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Jozef and David (bottom right) keeping our company at 5.30 am:

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And finally a pic of Gary, how we prepared him for rainy days and nights:

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4 thoughts on “Suaheli please …

    1. admin Post author

      I apologize 😉 The ‘CH’ is the way that Germans would pronounce what the Argintinians would pronounce ‘J’ … languages … funny stuff

      Reply
  1. Taube

    Nice hearing from you again 🙂
    Speaking english is the most common form of communication in multi linugual groups. But i find it quite funny if you mix the languages ,especially if you can not remember some technical terms and you use the word in your native language.

    I hope you have better weather, than we have .

    In that way : I wish you alles Gute and party hard !

    P.S.: Heiko, we need more Kalauer !

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      Our weather here gets worse and worse every day. Yesterday it was about 3 degrees in the night with rain all day before. Today it’s sunnier but also windy and quite chilly. So we are really looking forward to be on Tonga next week 😉

      Reply

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