If you ever work for a big corporation in an international setting, you will be forced to endure days of seminars about inter-cultural understanding. Although these companies could save millions each year by asking their employees to just treat other people with respect, they instead pay people to make up models and graphs to stereotype the different cultures of the world.
A typical example is the onion model of the American vs. the German coconut. Each person keeps their innermost secrets to themselves until you have unwrapped the vegetable or fruit, respectively. The American has layers and layers to peel off, and although each layer comes off seemingly effortlessly, getting to the core of an American takes a long time. With the German on the other hand the outer shell is hard and hairy and you feel like you never make any progress breaking into the core until the day the shell suddenly breaks apart, usually while you are both drunk at the company Christmas party.
If you are an expatriate, your company may pay some overpriced consultant to explain to you the graph of how your feeling of well-being progresses as you experience the stages of culture shock. They will tell you how happy and excited you will be in the beginning, but then how you will soon be less happy as the realities of the new setting take place, but that things will get better, and you may even enjoy your new home as much as your old home depending on whether your new home is as enjoyable as your old home, plus some other truly insightful details.
Well, times are tough now, and these useless programs are certainly easy targets for cutbacks in corporate budgets. Therefore, as a public service, Nothing For Ungood is releasing a new graph with arbitrary units as fodder for the marketing materials of these soon to be unemployed liberal arts phds:
This graph shows how smart you sound while speaking German in terms of how good your ability to speak German actually is. When you first start out in the beginner phase, you can only say things like “Ick heisse John. Ick kann sprecken Deutsch.” At this point you sound like a moron, but as your German improves to the point where you can talk about the weather, your credibility as an intelligent human sky rockets and peaks at the point where you realize that when you look up words in the German/English dictionary you shouldn’t always pick the one that sounds just like English because it shares a Latin root. Suddenly you stop saying “Ich muss etwas für die Party präparieren,” and instead replace it with ”Ich muss etwas für die Party vorbereiten,” and instantly you sound a bit dumber.
There is an inflection point, though, at the moment in which you stop just saying the words you don’t know in English and figure out ways to express yourself completely in German. This is shortly followed by realizing that some words can only be said in English without causing laughter, like when you talk about your tragbaren Rechner. Once you understand the right times to use English words the appearance of your intelligence approaches a local maximum until you grow tired of trying to pronounce things in German correctly. In the end you start sounding like a person of normal intelligence once you learn that, in German, every thought or feeling you have is best expressed in terms of pigs and sausage.
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