7.9 Ein Reiseblog aus Wien — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a personal travel diary in everyday German, told in the perfect and the present. Recognise a dozen words of Austrian German and their equivalents in Germany: Semmel and Brötchen , Paradeiser and Tomate . Understand that German is a language with several standard forms, and that Austrian German is one of them, not a dialect. Use the perfect with sein for travel: ich bin angekommen, gegangen, gestiegen, gefahren . Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English Mein Hotel liegt im dritten Bezirk, nicht weit vom Zentrum. My hotel is in the third district, not far from the centre. Der Kellner war sehr höflich, aber ein bisschen grantig. The waiter was very polite, but a little grumpy. Der Stephansdom ist riesig, und vom Turm sieht man die ganze Stadt. St Stephen's Cathedral is huge, and from the tower you can see the whole city. Ich bin über dreihundert Stufen gestiegen. I climbed over three hundred steps. Oben war es windig, aber die Aussicht war wunderbar. It was windy at the top, but the view was wonderful. Ein Sackerl ist eine Tüte. A Sackerl is a bag. Prerequisites : 7.8 — you need the perfect with haben and sein from 3.5 Verbs and 3.6 Verbs , the city vocabulary from 5.7 Vocabulary , and the food words from 5.4 Vocabulary . About this text This text was written for the course. It is the diary of a German speaker from Munich who spends five days in Vienna and keeps noticing words that are different from the German of Germany. It is 712 words long, in ten paragraphs, and every word form in it was checked against an open corpus of modern German; the few Austrian words that the corpus does not contain are standard Austrian vocabulary listed in the German dictionaries. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. The style is that of a personal blog: first person, the perfect for what happened, the present for descriptions. That is how people write about their own experiences, and it is the opposite of the news German in 7.6 Reading and the fairy tales in 7.7 Reading and 7.8 Reading , which use the simple past. Reading the three side by side shows you the two past tenses in their natural homes. Austrian German German has three standard forms, used in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and each is correct in its own country. The grammar is almost the same; the differences are in pronunciation, in a few hundred everyday words, and in greetings. The blog meets these: Austria Germany English Grüß Gott Guten Tag hello, formal Servus Hallo, Tschüss hi, bye, informal die Semmel das Brötchen bread roll der Paradeiser die Tomate tomato der Erdapfel die Kartoffel potato die Marille die Aprikose apricot das Sackerl die Tüte bag das Schlagobers die Sahne cream die Stiege die Treppe stairs der Jänner der Januar January grantig schlecht gelaunt grumpy das Beisl die Kneipe simple pub-restaurant Some of these words, such as Grüß Gott , Semmel and grantig , are also used in Bavaria, which shares a dialect area with Austria. Paradeiser is a German word, not a borrowing: it comes from an old German name for the tomato, paradise apple . When you hear one of these words, there is nothing to correct: you are hearing a standard German that is simply not the one in your textbook. If you plan to live in Austria, learn the Austrian word first. The perfect with sein A travel diary is full of verbs of movement, and those take sein in the perfect, as you learned in 3.6 Verbs : bin … angekommen , bin … gegangen , bin … gestiegen , bin … gefahren , bin … spazieren gegangen . The verbs of eating, ordering, looking and buying take haben : habe … gefrühstückt , habe … bestellt , habe … gegessen . Notice that war and hatte appear in the simple past even in this spoken style, exactly as 3.8 Verbs said they would: Heute war ich auf dem Naschmarkt , ich hatte meine eigene Tasche dabei . Reading it a second time Day 1 introduces the two greetings. Notice how the writer explains Servus with sowohl … als auch , both … and : it is used for hello and for goodbye. Day 2 is the longest. The coffee house is described in the present, because it is always like this; the writer's own breakfast is in the perfect, because it happened once. Watch that switch in every paragraph: general truths in the present, events in the perfect. The old lady's sentence about Vienna is reported in direct speech, with the quotation marks of 7.6 Reading . Days 2 and 3 carry most of the Austrian vocabulary. In each case the writer gives both words, the one used in Germany and the Austrian one, so the text explains itself: So heißen Tomaten in Österreich. Day 5 is a summary and a farewell, and it ends with the informal greeting from day 1, closing the circle. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Five Days in Vienna: My Travel Diary Day 1. Yesterday evening I arrived in Vienna by train. The journey from Munich took four hours, and I looked out of the window the whole time. My hotel is in the third district, not far from the centre. Vienna has twenty-three districts, and the Viennese often refer to them just by their number. When I arrived at the hotel, the woman at reception said " Grüß Gott !" In Austria and in Bavaria people say that instead of " Guten Tag ". Among friends, young people also say " Servus ", and that means both "hello" and "bye". Day 2. This morning I had breakfast in an old coffee house. A coffee house in Vienna is not an ordinary café. You sit there for a long time, read the newspaper, and nobody wants you to leave quickly. I ordered a Melange ; that is a coffee with lots of milk and foam, almost like a cappuccino. It always comes with a glass of water. I also ate a Semmel with butter and jam. In Germany people say Brötchen , in Vienna they say Semmel . The waiter was