6.4 Shopping — quantities and prices — Epoché
What you will be able to do Ask what something costs, in the two forms a German speaker uses: Was kostet das? and Wie teuer ist das? Understand a price said aloud, at the speed a market stallholder says it, and judge it: Alles ist teuer. · Alles ist billig. Buy by weight, using the metric quantities the whole German-speaking world buys in. Say that you are looking for something — Ich suche Batterien. — and answer the question every checkout asks: Benötigen Sie eine Tüte? Prerequisites : 6.3 — the café, and 5.6 — the numbers. This lesson is where the numbers have to be understood rather than merely known. Shopping is the conversation with the smallest vocabulary and the highest speed. You need perhaps twenty words, and you need to understand a number said quickly by somebody who says it forty times an hour. The vocabulary is the easy half. Who is speaking to whom Formal, both ways, in a shop or at a market stall — the same default as in the café. On a market you will sometimes be addressed informally by a stallholder who has decided you are a regular, and the same rule applies as before: follow, do not lead. One difference from the café: in a shop the assistant may speak first, with a question about what you are looking for. The answer is the formula that opens the second exchange below, Ich suche … , and it is worth having ready. Asking the price There are two ways. The commonest, the one in the exchanges, is the verb for to cost : what does that cost? The second is not in the exchanges but is just as common: the adjective for expensive used as a question — Wie teuer ist das? , literally how expensive is that? What comes back is the hard part, and it is worth rehearsing the shape. A German price is said as a number of euros, then the word for euro, then the cents as a plain number: two euros forty, with no word for cents at all. And the number itself is the reversed one you met in 5.6 — the units before the tens — so a price of forty-five cents arrives as five and forty , which is exactly the point at which a beginner's ear gives up. There is no shortcut. Say prices aloud to yourself until the reversal stops costing you a beat. Buying by weight Everything loose is sold by weight, and the units are metric: the kilogram, the half kilogram — which German also calls a pound, and which is five hundred grams rather than the English pound of four hundred and fifty-four — and the gram for small quantities like cheese or spices. A market request is built the same way every time: the quantity, then the thing, then bitte . Liquids go by the litre and by the bottle; bread by the loaf or the piece; eggs by the number. And the word for a piece is worth learning early, because it is how you buy anything that sits in a case at a counter — cakes, cuts of meat, portions of cheese. Where things are bought Four kinds of shop cover most of what a visitor needs, and their names are worth having because the signs are not always in English. The bakery is open early and is where most people buy their bread, which is bought daily; the butcher sells cooked meats and often lunch; the pharmacy ( die Apotheke ) sells mainly medicines, and everyday shampoo and toothpaste are bought in a different shop, die Drogerie — a distinction English-speaking countries mostly do not draw. And the supermarket is a supermarket, with the one difference that it closes on Sunday. That last point is the one to plan around. Shops in Germany are shut on Sundays , by law, with narrow exceptions for railway stations, petrol stations and bakeries in the morning. Austria and Switzerland are the same. A visitor who arrives on a Saturday evening expecting to shop the next day will find a closed town, and every German knows the Saturday-afternoon rush that this produces. Opening hours on the other days are long — often eight in the morning until eight at night — and are posted on the door under a word you will see everywhere, built from the words for opening and time. Small shops in villages still close over lunch. Exchange one — at a market stall Haben Sie Bananen? [1] Do you have bananas? Was kostet diese Banane? [2] How much does this banana cost? Was kostet das Brot? [3] How much does the bread cost? Was kostet der Kuchen? [4] How much does the cake cost? Alles ist teuer. [5] Everything is expensive. Ich suche Batterien. [6] I'm looking for batteries. Benötigen Sie eine Tüte? [7] Do you need a bag? The stallholder's last line is the question you will hear at every checkout in the country: do you need a bag? Bags cost money and have done for years, and the expected answer is usually no, because most people bring their own. A second version of the same question uses a different verb — Brauchen Sie eine Tüte? , in the second exchange. Exchange two — in a shop Ich suche T-shirts. [8] I'm looking for T-shirts. Haben Sie’s? [9] Do you have it? Was kostet das? [10] How much does that cost? Autos sind teuer. [11] Cars are expensive. Alles ist billig. [12] Everything is cheap. Brauchen Sie eine Tüte? [13] Do you need a bag? Notice what the customer does in the first line: names what they are looking for without any greeting or preamble. The corpus line has no greeting, but in a real shop you say Guten Tag first. Notice too that the customer's short question Haben Sie’s? is a contraction — the pronoun es has shrunk to an apostrophe and an s — which is how the question is actually said. Word list Word (article, plural) Meaning Notes kosten de to cost Gender / part of speech verb, weak How English differs a separate verb with the same spelling means to taste Wie viel kostet die Tasche? How much does the bag cost? teuer de expensive Gender / part of speech adjective How English differs used as a question word for the price: how expensive? Billig ist teuer. Buy cheap and waste your money. billig de cheap Gender / part of speech adjective How English differs carries the same hint of poor quality as the English word Billig ist teuer. Buy cheap and waste yo