| ??? 03/01/08 05:36 Read: times |
#151708 - It takes lots of time ... and being young helps Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Erik Malund said:
I learned to understand, but not speak, the Swabian dialect as well
I have been to may places in Germany and have (with varying difficulty) understood the natives. I never accomplished that with those speaking schwabisch the local Bavarian accent na ge hab ne bierche (if I recall) Many have tried but few have succeeded in writing Bavarian such that anyone other than a Bavarian could decrypt it. What I noticed early on in my tenure there, was that the Swabian dialect was spoken high in and nearer the front of the mouth than Bavarian, which seems, at times, to have been swallowed in part and often loses trailing syllables. Erik My work there involved visiting numerous places, sitting around and listening for a considerable time, and appearing, for all the world, at least to the U.S. military personnel, to be a native. I'm quite adept at picking up the local drawl and pretty quick with idioms, too, but the best I could do was to have people conclude I was from a nearby town but not that one. The challenge lay in that I only had a few days, at most, and then my report had to be on the local provost marshal's desk, by which time I had to be in my next appointed locus. I was a snoop, doncha know! RE |
