Last year was a challenging year for me on many levels. First I was living in a big city in a crazy country. Second, I was actually TEACHING English, and felt like I had a real grown up job. And third, learning a new language, straight from scratch….and Russian was HARD. I thought, hey, if I can learn Russian, I can learn any language pretty easily, right? Well….Then I moved to Luzern. Admittedly you can cheat here, people tend to speak some other language, whether it be Italian, French, or English. But still, everyone around me speaks a language that, although I understand more and more day by day, I’d really like to speak.
So I decided to go to school, and study German. I’ve studied a language before, I knew exactly what to do. But the instant I opened my books and stared at the words on the page, I came to the realization that they didn’t look like any of the words I’d heard people use all around me, seven days a week. At first I thought the German language must have some strange pronunciation rules, but then it dawned on me: what I’ve been hearing is nothing like what I’m learning in school. It was almost like two different languages. And in fact, in some ways, it turns out they are.
In many ways, Swiss German and German are different. Although the base is the same, and the vocabulary can look similar, the problem is that the pronunciation is so skewed and the Swiss seem to throw grammar out the window so that you end up with sentences that don’t look the same at all. What really throws a learner off are the basics in Swiss. Instead of a simple “Guten tag,” (high German) you get thrown a “Grüetzi,” (Swiss German). To make it even more confusing, they often throw in a French word or two, borrowed from their fellow Swiss, French neighbors. The first time I heard the word “velo” (bicycle in Swiss German), I was convinced I must have heard wrong. The list goes on.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my friends, so worry not. Although your schoolbook German may not resemble anything you hear in der Schweiz, you’ll be happy to know that for the most part, Swiss German is only a spoken language. That means that all official documents, books, magazines, and newspapers are written in High German, so you actually can understand (this also avoids that confusing spelling that Swiss apparently have, where they spell words however they feel like writing them). And all Swiss German pupils (and French and Italian ones for that matter too) learn High German in school, so that they can communicate themselves properly in other German speaking countries. A caution to tourists, is that be forwarned, your average Swiss person may understand High German perfectly, but they are also likely to have an aversion to speaking in that foreign language. My good friend Elizabeth once traveled to Zurich and attempted to ask in her best German where the train station was. Her face dropped when the reply came out in some odd sort of jumpy language she couldn’t understand. “Like drunken Germans,” someone once said. And that would make sense, except it’s hard to picture a serious faced Swiss businessman drunk, when he’s speaking to someone at 9 in the morning on his commute train. Odd.
