Two international evenings in the week are not the only moments I learn more about the blue-white German language.. at home, I have to speak it all the time and happily they correct me when I say something not entirely correct or simply impossible. And so I learned, for example, that:
* something is not "peinlich" (painfull) when it hurts
* something is not "dreckig" (dirty) when it tastes bad
* someone is not "gehe etwas machen" when one is going to do something (he simply will: one "macht etwas"!)
* someone is not going to "lecker schlafen" / be "lecker warm" / have a "lecker Wochenende" (like the Dutch say - the Germans only use "lecker" for food !)
Anyways, the starter errors, that lead to a lot of giggles from the Merkels ("let's make a book, The Mistakes of Silvia")..
Then you also have words, that for a Dutchie are easy to confuse. Some more prove that German and Dutch is more different than you think:
* "knapp" is not "knap" (clever/handsome), it means near/narrow,
* "schlimm" is not "slim" (smart), it means worrying/grave,
* "mogen" is not "mogen" (be allowed to) but means to like,
* "durfen" is not "durfen" (have the courage to) but means be allowed to in German..
Something that made me laugh however, was that Malte bothered in Kindergarten every parent with "how to count in Dutch", that in Germany warning signs don't softly say "verboten" but "VERBOTEN!", that the newspaper Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung reports about all the historic documents being lost after the collapse of Köln's city artchive, while Bild only worries about the possible death of 9 persons due to the "earth trembling" crash which it compares with 11 September, and that Gunnar has the same toy box (but -as a German- more "grundlichkeit"!) than this clever guy:
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