#on the Germans

[salvadorbonaparte]

I told my students they're allowed to be creative and don't have to be factual when writing about themselves in German because I keep getting questions like "what if I don't have roommates or what if I don't have hobbies" and I'm like guys just make something up! Have fun! I won't fact check you!

So now I am grading homework where a student is claiming to be from North Korea and his hobby is tax fraud

[rainbowcrowley]

today a fascist won an election for the first time since 1933. here, in germany.

i don't care if it's just one (out of 16) states. björn höcke is a fascist. a court decided not long ago that it's allowed to call him a nazi. bc he is one. not "far right" or "conservative" - he is a nazi.

here. in germany. and he just won an election.

it hasn't even been 100 years.

i am scared.

[redrook]

old German lady gave me acupuncture today

she lifted up my shirt, saw my top surgery scars, and immediately went "WHOA! What caused THIS?"

my fellow comrades, it took every atom of my strength not to just say the funniest lie I could think of on the spot.

[schreibfederlaerm]

so this European clothing retailer decided to advertise their jean cuts on youtube and it's unintentionally the funniest shit I've seen today. why? well.

now important context here: in German, die (pronounced 'dee') is just a feminine article, it literally means "the".

but if an ad gets placed in the middle of an English video and doesn't use a single explicitly German word for most of the ad, even a native speaker is gonna think "they want me to die how?" it keeps getting funnier.

I mean, holy shit

i will use these as reaction images until i die

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

imagination (1963) - harold ordway rugg

"chekhovs cat / schrödingers razor / occams gun"

[satans-cool-blog]

I’ve been obsessed with this tweet for a while so I’m posting the it to tumblr to inflict it on more people

[vollkornbot]

English: we call it sinusitis because it's Latin :)

German: we call it Nasennebenhöhlenentzündung because the Höhlen neben your Nase are entzündet.

[valla-chan]

Crazy how every language fully understood cats when they named them. Cat, Gato, Neko, Chat, Katze, Qitta, Mao... Like yeah all of you are just 100% correct

[foxesdontscareme]

ally beardsley loves playing weird guys and hot bitches and thank god for that

[foldingfittedsheets]

When I was learning German my teacher pulled me aside to ask which of my parents spoke German. I was confused and said neither. Then belatedly I remembered that my dad did speak very rudimentary German after being stationed in Heidelberg for a few years.

This teacher was well loved but very strict, being questioned by her was always a little intimidating. I didn’t know why she was asking.

She pressed to ask if he spoke it with me and I laughed nervously and said no I asked him not to speak it because he couldn’t even conjugate verbs.

Apparently my accent was so good that she assumed I’d had more than one year of practice. The problem was my vocabulary. Ironically I needed her to translate the word for accent as I was unfamiliar with it. I was a decent student but some words tripped me up.

One day she conducted an oral exam and asked us to talk about the hospital. We could say whatever we wanted. In the middle of my nervous little monologue about how we go to the hospital when we are sick and the doctors and nurses help us she suddenly burst out laughing.

I had never seen her laugh before, at least not more than a sensible chuckle. But here she was, bent over her stomach cracking up leaving me baffled as to how talking about the nurses could possibly have inspired this extreme hilarity.

The word I was trying to use for nurse was “Pfleger” but I’d said “Fluger”. (Possibly fliegen? It’s been a long time) What I said was close to fly, and the teacher was imagining flying nurses drifting along the hospital wing.

She apologized and tried to compose herself but she admitted that hearing my extremely competent accent saying absolute nonsense was the highlight of her week.

[dostoyevsky-official]

the americans going "i need to leave to europe" and especially the smug europeans saying "america needs to fix its racist, climate change denier voters" are operating on an advanced model of cognitive dissonance. sir starmer's landslide labour country was gripped by race riots a few months ago and handed out five years to climate protesters. nearly every far right party in europe is first or second with youth voters for both genders: RN secured about a third of both 18-24 and 25-34 age groups; young men across the continent said they would vote trump by massive margins. tusk barely beat back orban 2.0 in poland, and his immediate reaction was to double down on fortress europe—something all other parties are doing. EU politicians are so averse to public investment that this fear blew up the german government yesterday.

there is nowhere to run, there is no country "safe" from the global far right wave

[slothmonth]

I agree that "in Germany your boss legally has to provide you with work while you're at your job" is a bit funny considering the German stereotype. But I am really annoyed at people who act like this is some horrible hypercapitalist thing on that post about pushing people out of their jobs by just not giving them anything to do. When really it's very basic worker protection (within the context of German emplyment law.) Because under most circumstances you can't just be fired from your job. Your employer has to provide a reason for firing you if they want to get rid of you. You also have a right to specifially the work you were hired to do.

So your boss having to give you appropriate work makes illegal any of the following:

a) Making you clean toilets instead of (or in addition to) the clearly defined office job you agreed to do

b) Not giving you work and then firing you for not doing your work

c) Waiting for you to crack under the intense boredom of having to stay on one place with absolutely nothing to do for eight hours a day while your coworkers are roped into it to shun you (or hate you because for some reason you're the only one who doesn't have to do any work) until you quit "voluntarily"

or d) waiting for you to crack under the aformentioned pressure until you do what the people in the notes said they'd do, like watching movies or doing a second job instead which is something you then can be reprimanded and fired for

[mischievousdog]

Wolpertinger

[otterlycurly]

Can’t stop thinking about this video so i’m posting it here from the bird app for oomf and oomf ONLY