Mind you, I’ve been living in the UK for quite a few years now, and there are still a couple of things that I struggle with – often on a daily. Nothing cultural, not in a way that things are being handled differently here than in my home country. No, worse. Things, that I thought I inherently knew. Things, that I’ve been taught my entire life that now just don’t work anymore. I am talking things, that are so deeply ingrained, that I simply can’t get them out of my head. Here are the worst three.

Saying numbers out loud

This is so stupid, but here we go. In German, we read numbers in a different way than in English. If we have a double digit, instead of saying “fourty five”, reading it cleanly left to right, we mention the [Einer]¹ first, then the [Zehner]². So for a 45, we would say Fünfundvierzig – five and forty. That’s it. That’s the only difference. Everything adding up to that, we also cleanly read left to right. So 3456 would be Dreitausendvierhundertsechsundfünfzig (man, long numbers are fun to write out, and definitely one of the reasons German words are so long) – three thousand four hundred… six and fifty.

This messes with my mind so badly, I can’t express in words. But I am trying to. This is what I am here for. So you see the issue, right? Well, the result of this nonsense is usually, that I just screw up the number entirely. For some reason, my brain’s been in the mindspace of “Oh, hold on, it’s English numbers, so I have to be clever and not do the German thing.” So 10/10 times a number such as 98 turns out to be “Eighty nine”. Why? Well, you see, my brain’s recognising that I shouldn’t say Einer first. But it’s not smart enough to not look at the Einer first. It’s a mess and I feel like an idiot.

Writing out decimals

There’s a little pattern here with numbers – but it’s not as bad as the first one, I promise. In Germany, we simply have the usage of a period and a comma swapped. So, if you’re buying something for £1.99 in the store, you’d buy it for 1,99€. If you’ve got £2,456.98 in your bank account, your German one would look like this instead: 2.456,98€. Now, it’s just a small thing, but I really have to stop and think for a heartbeat, before I type it in. And yes, the payment system at work has given my an uncountable amount of nudges, saying “are you sure this is the amount you want to pay? Seems kinda high to me” by now. I am getting better at it, though.

Having a phone call

Right, if you’re someone who doesn’t like having phone calls to begin with, this one will scare you even more. I am, by now, very fluent in English and I don’t have any issues with holding a conversation (except if you go fully into a dialect or some mean thing, of course). But on the phone? My goodness. See, I think the issue is, that my brain still doesn’t know yet how to fill blanks. You know how, if you’re out in a crowd somewhere, your mind will passively listen to everything around you and filter it automatically for you? Well, in a second language, it’s still just white noise. I think as good as I am in this language, it’s still a lot of effort for my brain to compute it. So if I don’t have to actively partake, it just doesn’t bother. Which is nice when I am out and about, because I just blank out other people’s conversations, whereas in Germany, I’m passively listening. And again, I think the reason for this is that I can’t fill in blanks. If I only hear shreds in German, I can still construct the context. Oh boy, not in English. And the same phenomenon happens on the telephone, when sometimes words just disappear into the ether and everything sounds mumbled anyway. And now imagine the person on the other end also having a strong accent. You’ll just have to accept defeat at that point. There’s a reason I have a deal with my partner about them making all the calls.

[Picture by Zarah V. Windh – thank you!]

1. Einer – literally “the one-er”, kind of – it’s difficult to translate cleanly in this context. It describes the single digits 0-9 in a longer number. So in the number 1234, the 4 would be the Einer. ↩︎
2. Zehner – literally “the tenner”. Building up from before, it describes the decimal space in a number. Same example as before, in the number 1234, the 3 would be the Zehner. ↩︎