International flights into Switzerland usually arrive at either Geneva or Zurich airports. Geneva is the second most populous city in Switzerland. It is also a global city, a financial center, and a worldwide center for diplomacy. As I looked around I could pick out people from Japan, China, India, Italy, France, Germany and many other countries. Listening to them speak was a real treat … a melody of languages. Both of these airports are very convenient to traveling to Zermatt, Switzerland, a gateway to the Matterhorn. But don’t miss taking a little time to visit the azure blue lakes; Lake Geneva and Lake Lucerne with their castles. Then it’s on to the Matterhorn, Switzerland’s most famous mountain of 14,692 feet; the mountain that movies have been made about. It is located in the Penninie Alps on the border of Switzerland and Italy. In German “matte” means “meadow” and “horn” means “peak.” It is the tenth highest peak in Switzerland.
There were seven of us, four adults with three children, in our Honda Odyssey making our way towards the Swiss Alps. The morning was sunny with a few white billowy cumulus clouds making their way lazily across the wide expanse of blue. The road was very straight most of the time with a few curves intermingled. Looking out the window, we saw green fields dotted here and there with acres of yellow flowers that looked like sunflowers. The beauty took my breath away. It was so picturesque, just like in the travel magazines I had seen.
Off in the distance, I could see mountains rising up from the green plains we had been traveling through. At last I could see them … the Swiss Alps. This was the home of Heidi, my favorite childhood novel. I can still remember some of her adventures. Her grandfather lived here and cared for her in these wondrous mountains. The Heidi book is among the best known works of Swiss literature and well worth reading to your children.
As we drove into Zermatt, a beautiful, little tourist town at the foot of the Alps, we parked our car on the outskirts and walked from there. No cars or big tour buses allowed in the village. The train stops here and goes no further. This is one of the great ski and climbing centers in the world. This deep valley is nestled between two steep, sculptured mountains. The air is crisp and clean with an Alpine flavor. Summer flowers drape themselves from each building along the way. Its cobblestone streets and pathways take you back in time to a simpler way of life. It is beautiful. It is exhilarating. It is special to be here; to see this great mountain and walk the cobblestone streets of Zermatt.
The Matterhorn is truly a magnificent mountain. A dream comes true, just to be here.
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Have you ever been to Polish Town, Czech Town or Korean Village?
Sounds strange, doesn’t it. So why are there so many China Towns around the world? How about a nice Danish Roll, a French pastry or some Baklava?
Speaking of Baklava, I can almost taste the thin layers of phyllo dough, with chopped nuts in between those paper thin layers, with a little honey added. I love Middle Eastern pastries and the Balkan cuisine. Let’s have some Chocolate Bavarian from the Normandie Café, one of my favorite French pastry shops. Is it any wonder my weight keeps going up? If I add “rich buttery flaky dough that Chania Townturns pastries into a sinful delight,” my Danish for breakfast doesn’t help my weight a bit.
Sauerkraut, Danish meatballs, pizza, Thai noodles, Kung Pao chicken, sesame oil chicken wings, stir-fry, bok choy, Moo Goo Gai Pan to name a few more favorite foods that keep me thinking about food.
Don’t’ you just love to eat? When I go out for the evening or even for lunch, I seem to choose German, Italian, Chinese, French, Thai, Indian/Hindi, or a Japanese restaurant. We have any and all kinds to choose from. We can pick different countries, different foods and all within a few miles from where we live. I don’t have to go far to feel like I am in a different country clear across the world.
Every restaurant has something special about it. Different restaurants have interwoven within their walls different foods, colors, languages, customs and some great people.
Developing their recipes has taken eons of time. We now experience the best a country had to offer in taste and drink. It is like having our very own “Sunday Dinner” with them. They offer us the best they have.
I have wandered through China Townes across the world from San Francisco to New York and from Singapore to Yokohama. What an experience: the sites, the smells, the people, the food. As we walk down a narrow street together in Shanghai we look through the window and start salivating as we see some of the best food we have ever laid our eyes on. Look at those bright greens, heaps of snow white sticky rice, bowls of steaming soup and those pieces of chicken and beef, browned to perfection. I can’t contain myself. How about you? Of course we go in … are we stupid?
We would do the same thing, if it had been a Polish Town, Czech Town or a Korean Village. It is just that most of the time it is a China Town, Italian Village or a Thai restaurants. Each culture has its culinary delights; we just need to find them. So let’s just keep looking.
Lunch time … see you later!
German is one of the world’s major languages with an estimated 95 million native speakers and 28 million second-language speakers in some 40 countries around the world.
Do you want to learn to speak German? You won’t be alone.
- German is the official language of Germany (with Danish, Frisian, and Sorbian as minority languages).
- Standard German is the only official language in Liechtenstein and Austria. It is spoken by 7.5 million people in Austria.
- In Switzerland, German has co-official status with French, Italian, and Romansh.
- In Belgium, German shares official status with Dutch and French.
- In Luxembourg, German shares official status with French and Luxembourgish.
- German is the official language along with Italian of the Vatican Swiss Guard.
- German is used as a regional language in Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Denmark, France, and Namibia.
- German is one of the 23 official languages of the European Union. German is the language with the largest number of native speakers in the European Union, and the second most spoken language in Europe after English.
- German is one of the three working languages of the European Commission, along with English and French.
- German was once the lingua franca of central, eastern and northern Europe. Today, it is the second most studied language in Europe and Asia, after English. The popularity of German is supported by the wide availability of German TV in Europe.
- German is the third most-commonly taught language in U.S. schools and universities, after Spanish and French.
Are you ready to learn to speak German? Try Pimsleur Method German. With Pimsleur Method, you’ll learn to both speak and understand the German language. Please visit PimsleurMethod.com for discounted Pimsleur Method German courses. Available on CD or Instant Download.
Many people overlook the German language when looking for a new language to learn because most people think there are only few people who use it as their spoken language or that it doesn’t have an international presence. But the fact is, the German language is not only the official language in Germany but also in several other European countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine (France), Northern Italy, East-Belgium, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. It is also spoken in other countries outside Europe such as Brazil, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Paraguay, Australia, South Africa, Nambia and Moldova. It has approximately 100 million speakers all over the world. And it is considered one of the most popular languages in the world.
The German language has two principal classifications. One is High German or Hochdeutsch and the other is Low German or Plattdeutsch. The main difference between the two is the consonant shift that started long before the 8th century. Hochdeutsch is considered as standard German today and is used almost always for written German. Books and newspapers are printed in Hochdeutsch. And it is spoken by educated speakers everywhere.
The German language also has a distinct accent where the stress usually falls on the word’s first or root syllable. The pronunciation of the language is kind of simple. If you speak English, all you have to do is put exaggerations on the lip and mouth configurations for you to be able to pronounce German words correctly. In pronouncing German vowels, you have to spread your lips and round your mouth or you can place your tongue higher or flatter than you do when pronouncing English vowels. As for its consonants, it requires less release of air than similar English consonant.
German has a lot of long compounds; for example ‘history of language’ is translated as ‘Sprachgeschichte’ in the German language. Another characteristic of the language is that all of its nouns are capitalized. Also, inflection, declination and grammatical gender are important features of their grammar. Written German also utilizes several additional letters as compared to the 26 letters used in the English alphabet. Examples are ä, ö, ü which are referred to as umlauts and ß, which is typically used to replace a double “s” in a word.
The German language may be easier for English speakers to learn because of its familiarity. That’s because English and German both have their roots in the Germanic languages, making them much more similar. Like all other languages, it takes years to gain a thorough understanding of the German language. But considering its shared origins with English, it becomes one of the easier languages to learn.
Because you must walk before you can run, you cannot start right off thinking in a language, especially when you must proceed at the relatively slow pace of that of the typical foreign language college course. You must begin thinking in English and translating foreign words into and from English to your new language. Only gradually can you abandon translation and come to think in the language. But until you begin to think in your new language … you don’t really know it.
In the very first weeks of a course in a foreign language, students nearly always translate word for word. That is all right for the kind of elementary sentences you get in this stage, but it won’t do at all when the going gets tougher. Yet many students persist in this word-for-word translation throughout the entire study of a language. For a language like Spanish this is less likely to get you into trouble (because the grammar and word order are so much like English) but in other languages like Latin and German, it does not work so well because the word orders are quite different from the English ones. A second-year student in German can easily get lost trying to find his way word for word through the seemingly impenetrable thicket of a German sentence. For the German word order is so different that it makes little sense, you must learn to think in the German word order and get a sense of the sentence as a whole before you look up the specific words you do not know. And even when you are concentrating on specific words, you must keep in mind the relationship between words. The over-all meaning of the word is very important for you to be able to translate them properly.
You will discover yourself that this is the only way you can translate complicated sentences. If you are doing no better than word-for-word translation, you are in trouble and you will need a lot of help. We cannot tell you exactly what your difficulties will be since they will be different for different people. One frequent difficulty, however, is that the student who does not have the basic elements of the vocabulary, such as relative pronouns or irregular verbs, memorized, will find that it will be very difficult. It needs to be something that comes naturally and if it doesn’t, it will be very difficult. If you don’t know the syntax or word order well enough to be able to tell where they are in a sentence you have more problems. This is particular difficulty for students of German. Thus in a sentence like Haben Sie den Bauer gesehen, der auf dem Wagen sass? (“Have you seen the farmer who sat in the wagon?”), a badly confused student may try to translate der as a definite article rather than as a relative pronoun. An example of a parallel problem is in a French sentence like Elle a recu les fleurs que lui ont envoyees des amies (“She received the flowers that friends sent her”), where the unobservant student may read the objective pronoun que as the nominative pronoun qui thus making the sentence make no sense. By looking over the whole sentence structure and then by relating the words to one another, you would not make a mistake like this.
In your favor, a good language from PimsleurMethod will make it a much easier adventure and you will have success.