Descent into Insanitz Because of a Kezboard

So, zou maz notice that something about this looks a little bit different.  When I first got to Germanz, I bought a cheap kezboard because I find it reallz uncomfortable to use mz laptop’s kezboard.  Being in Germanz, I naturallz bought one with a German lazout. Although the German kezboard shares manz commonalities with the American lazout, it definitelz has its differences, one of which is that the z and y kezs are swapped in position.  To avoid annozing us all too badlz, Iäm (ä is also where ‘ is on an American kezboard) going to go ahead and switch back into the American lazout. Just an editorial note for those not in the know: the layout of a keyboard can be changed in Windows to match that of whatever language you want.  The letters on the face of the keys are obviously not different, but what comes out when you hit the key is changed according to what language you have selected.

I learned most of the differences between the two pretty easily, since my brain interpreted so many of them as “new”, meaning I didn’t have to first unlearn and then relearn things, just acquire new things.  What has driven me to madness though, is this whole y and z thing.  When trying to type in English with a German keyboard, I constantly had to go back and replace the z with a y in pretty much every case.  For example, I want to type the sentence “Hey what are you doing?”  In the German layout, it comes out like this, “Hez what are zou doingÄ”.

English as a Unifying Language

So I’m back to Germany today (technically yesterday, but I was too tired to do anything but flop over and sleep), and after going to the supermarket, I sort of re-realized just how much American language and culture permeate Germany (and Europe in general). A large percentage of packing cartons for products in supermarkets have English instructions or shipping labels, “look” and “image” have both entered the standard German vocabulary (mostly in ads), C&A sells a shirt with “Eat me, baby” on it (with pictures of apples on it, too), and a large number of “hip” businesses have English words in their slogans and in many cases consist entirely of English. Examples: Forever19, Terracotta-arts and pots, and my favorite brand of peanut butter, “Real American Crunchy Style Peanut Butter” or something. Sadly I don’t have any of it at the moment, so I can’t be sure of the actual exact name.

On a cold morning in February, while waiting for the bus to the train station at about 6am, a man with luggage came up next to me, out of breath, sort of looked at me a for a bit, then looked at the schedules for a while, then back at me again. He began to speak, hesitated, then went on in very excellent English, “Have I missed the bus to the train station already?” I started laughing, simply because I hadn’t at all expected it to be English. Turns out he was a researcher from Puerto Rico working at the Max Planck Institut and was going to a conference of some sort. I find it, however, very interesting that his chances of finding a person who could speak English were really quite high. In my experience so far, I have not met even a single student (German student, I should clarify) at Universität des Saarlandes who could not speak at least reasonably good English.