You know you're turning German when...

You completely ignore anyone you haven't been formally introduced to
You complain about Turks
You put your money down next to the cashier rather than in his or her hand when you go back the UK

Tutting and shaking your head when the tram is a whole ONE minute late.
Taking your own bags to the supermarket.
Ditching your fancy sandals and taking your Birkenstocks on holiday because it's "praktisch"

Guilty of all myself!

... you start every post with "Exactly"

That sounds more like Italy than Germany.


!!!
What is this?
Please elaborate. This is weirding me out and sounds very embarassing.

Forgot about that one! I hope to GOD I never end up doing that here or in any other country. A social pet peeve of mine here...can you tell??! LOL

This has happened to me a few times. My wife and I were walking somewhere and happened to bump into a colleague of hers (someone I'd never met before.) So, they see each other, chat for a few and then leave. And, I'm standing a few feet away waiting to be introduced. Something that didn't happen. After the colleague left, my wife told me who it was. And her explanation? "Oh, I forgot!" And this has happened 3-4 times with different people. Good to know that it's something German and not just her

It happened to me a couple of times too...But its not just the German thing, but also something to do with relationship stuff,insecurities, etc etc..!

Best post in the thread imo and oh so true... they all do it, everytime they come to a standstill, not only at traffic lights!

I'm always wary when I stop my motorcycle behind a tin box, especially on a slope, where they - and I mean everyone! - still don't bother to apply the hand brake. It's often impossible to pull away again without rolling back - lazy and dangerous practice, as the vehicle is not fully under control. Not to mention all those brakes lights glaring in dark, wet conditions. Is this what learner drivers are taught to do here here, I wonder?

Apparently they do it to let the person behind you know that you're braking. How lame is that? Sad part is that even I've started doing it

I have started saying things like "sag mal" and "pass auf" at the beginning of sentences when I speak in English which is slightly concerning.

When you start putting white lights on your Christmas tree instead of coloured ones,
and when you see coloured lights on someone elses tree you say " iiii wi kitschig!"

You work 12 hours a day; six of them constucting elaborate cover ups so that your boss doesn't find out that you made a mistake; because it is far more important to hide mistakes or blame them on another department than it is to fix them & the problems they create and thus prevent them being repeated in the future.

When you walk into a local restaurant/pub/bar/post office and announce your entry by saying guten tag/morgen/abend without addressing anyone in particular, but the whole room.

oops (blue lights on tree in garden . . . .)

well I must admit I prefer white lights instead of coloured ones but I'm far from being german

Incidentally, I have this pantomime every time I've been at Ikea in FFM. Ikea DOES take Debit Cards (Maestro - Switch as was) - but none of the checkout jockeys ever believe me until the Supervisor is called over, and they deign to "have a try" (thinking full well that it WON'T work). When it works, the incredulous looks, and mumbled apologies,are priceless.

SO TRUE!!!

Is it only in Germany that if you go to the post office and want to pay for something that costs less than 5€ you MUST pay in cash, no exceptions??!! I didn´t have enough change on me once and the postal rep (small kiosk) told me to go to the bank...she refused to take my EC card. I didn´t see anything posted about minimum amount required to be able to pay with my bank card. Anyone know this unwritten rule?

Yes. When I started lessons here I automatically tended to use the handbrake a lot - my teacher was quite bemused and said it was a very anglo-saxon habit; I could keep doing it if I felt more comfortable but it was considered a bit old-fashioned here and even a sign that you are not very confident in your ability to control the car with just the pedals, that was his verdict.

How else you know you're turning German
- When everyone who comes to visit says 'you're so German!' at least once a day, usually because of your attempts to arrange organised fun (which simply means I might have suggested we plan dinner into a night out in advance rather than waiting until a bunch of drunk people are suddenly so ravenous they must all disappear in different directions in search of anything edible, get lost and somehow find their way home at varying stages throughout the night - or even the next day.)
- You remember with horror and shame the days when you thought the honour system on pubilc transport was so naive as to deserve to be abused... and issue above mentioned rogue drunkards with the standard 'you're on your own if you get caught' disclaimer before sitting nervously beside the renegades.
- You see no reason to reconsider your cycle into work despite driving rain, wind, snow or sub-zero temperatures.
- You are a bread rascist and look at anything as pale as Toastbrot with a mixture of pity and disgust.
- When Denglisch comes so naturally you don't even realise it until you go back to a place where they speak a more convetional form of English... and telling people 'I'll invite you' after a coffee together leaves them looking a little confused and worried. As do requests for toast bread.

But I'm doing ok - I have not yet succumbed to the abuse of the exclamation mark when hysterically claiming that every single email is TOP URGENT!!! ERRATUM!!! SHOWSTOPPER!!! DRRRRRRRINGEND!!!

You start sending your kids to school in ski suits as soon as the temperature drops below 10 degrees C.

444

To be honest that sounds like you work for a US company

You buy yourself a Pinocchio hat.
When driving and you see a bend in the road just ahead (not an actual turning) you put your turn indicator on.
At traffic lights or traffic stalls - reasons race through your mind for you to get out the car and open your boot/trunk.

What did he say you should do if you were not very confident in OTHER people's ability to control the car with just the pedals?

Lots and lots of Abstand halten I suppose. I like the handbrake so I'm sticking with that. He also found my steering quite amusing and quickly got me to stop the threading technique my Mum had taught me years ago. Seems it is also old-fashioned and not very effective really - although I agreed with him on that one.

you arrive at work and spend the first 20 minutes of the day transferring the contents of your jacket/pants/bag - keys, wallet, ausweis etc. - into the top drawer of your desk and then spend the rest of the day wondering (preferably aloud) whether to bring said items with you on your various out-of-office forays

I realized that there are actually people with whom I prefer to use the Sie form.

When you park your car on the street blocking traffic and there's a space to park your car a few meters away, but you don't bother.

I think this quote works with 90% of the comments in this thread.

It appears there needs to be a "Why are so many PEOPLE so whiny?" thread, not a "Why are so many Americans so whiny?" thread.

Oops, now I'm whining about whiny people again.

(_)ß

When you read an advert at Stansted airport and it's not until you read the one next to it, which is the same ad but in Italian, do you realise that it was in German!

when you get pissed because of a minimum amount of noise!!
when you don't bother to say sorry anymore...

Been here 5 months now and yes THEY DO STARE, i noticed it very quickly and thought you could´nt do that in England without attracting unwanted fist in nose attention.

Someone mentioned Germans complaining. I was in Egypt last week where I heard 3 German women complaining about how many Germans there were! Oh the irony...

Anyway, you know you're German if you start panic buying everything in sight because the supermarket will be closed for 24 hours on a public holiday.

If the car's an automatic they do it so they can drive off as soon as it's green without the idiot behind banging on their horn after a milisecond

In the UK (and, I'm assuming, other Commonwealth countries. I know they do in South Africa, which bases their instruction on the UK system) people are taught to use the hand brake when stopped at a light, stop sign, etc.. No other country I know of teaches this. Nobody I know from any other country uses the hand brake for anything other than parking. This is not a "German thing." This is a "UK thing."

(_)ß

when we go to the grocery stores around here the people in line stare at us for using our ec card. i hate carrying a lot of cash. and the checkout ladies are always suprised when it works. i had one lady keep pressing the wrong buttons on her keyboard (i watched her do this several times) and then she insisted that it was me doing the wrong thing (wrong pin or something) and the whole time the screen was telling her that she hit the wrong function key. wuahh!!! I HATE THAT! she doesn't know how to work her system and i get to hear how its my fault. it took her colleague coming over to fix it for her with a "what is your problem look"

Where are you living? Every supermarket I go into takes EC cards and a great many people use them. In fact I used mine in the supermarket today and so did the guy in front of me. If you saw the women was having problems why didn't you say something. What has this got to do with the thread title?

You know you're turning German when you insist on an orderly debate, following all the rules and staying on subject

Man, I noticed I was having problems when I tried to read the number 168 in English as "One-Hundred-Eight-and...ah shit..."

In my experience, the 'nasty German stare' is actually only true of southern Germany, especially Bavaria. No one takes any notice of anyone else in Leipzig or the Rhineland both of which I have spent long periods of time in unless they're making a public exhibition of themselves. I find Berliners and Hamburgers make more eye contact with each other in public places more because they're 'dreist' and they like to flirt, they don't stare in the horrible, provincial way that the Bavrians and Badeners do.

Can't say I have noticed it up North either & I've been here 25+ years... On other hand I don't use public transport much

Staring is one of the few things Berliners do well. They even have the front to stare at you and talk about you at the same time.

I don't understand the staring issue either, and I've been here 16 years. Never noticed and undue staring activity. People feeling self-conscious, perhaps?

I'm currently in San Francisco Bay Area for a two weeks and have been talking to new business partners from Italy. At one point, today, when we were measuring a brand new luxury swimming pool with a length of 74 feet, the two Italians asked me, " Is it ok if we speak in Italian, now?" I had to stop myself from saying, "kein problem" !

You know you're turning german when...you start planning to attend the octoberfest in January.
Toytown Germany Oktoberfest Do 2008

When you start looking out the kitchen window everytime you hear something.
When you stop using deodrant.
When you answer the phone with you're last name.
When you avoid any type of conflict.
When you drink weissbeer for breakfast with weisswurst. (look too much like a penis)
When you say wiolence instead of violence.
When you stop wearing tennis shoes.
When you start ignoring at the porn magazines next to the children comics at the grocery store.
When you start believing what the german news says about america.
When you start hanging around at the gas station drinking beer at 7am...

When you go to the supermarket to do your shopping you leave the trolley in the middle of an aisle, or across the end of one, so as to cause maximum inconvenience to other shoppers and then wander off down the nearby rows of shelves for ten minutes gathering the items you want before bringing them back to the trolley. And this is regardless of the width of the aisles between shelves.

On the staring issue, I too have noticed it. I noticed it in particular on the buses in Trier when we lived there - that is not to say it doesn't happen elsewhere, as I don't use much public transport at the moment as we are living in a much smaller town and I can walk everywhere. I never noticed it on the public transport in Sydney when I lived and worked there and travelled on trains and buses daily and that combined with the fact that my German wife doesn't understand why it annoys me so much leads me to believe that it is something intrinsic to Germans.

Ladies, you better stay away from this guy...

Damnit: the Ozzies took the hint from your line: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/,ra16m1/wissen/...kel/152/151770/

You go through a McDonalds drive-thru in the UK and ask for "2 big mac maxi menus, please"

(and no, they werent both for me.)

unless it involves poland

I love it, 1/2 the people accuse "the Germans" of avoiding conflict, the other half accuse them of being rude.