October 2012
Intermediate to advanced
360 pages
4h 57m
English
Some time ago, my favorite development editor, Damon Jordan, sent me an email and closed it with “Ich möchte eine Föhnwelle,” which means “I’d like a blow wave.” Unfortunately, I didn’t know what either a Föhnwelle or a blow wave was, so I declined. He then told me he had found this sentence in a German phrasebook he recently bought.
I was interested and had a look at some German phrasebooks. I think they are great tools to get around in a foreign country, although I personally think that some of the phrases offered just don’t make sense. For instance, in one phrasebook, I found a series of pickup lines, including the ingenious “You have a beautiful personality,” something that didn’t work for me either in English, in German, or ...