Die Guardian berichtet von 24 englischen Schulkindern auf einem Lerne-Deutschland-Kennen-Besuch.
bq. “It’s a lot cleaner than Britain. The public transport is great. And there are these recycling bins everywhere,” he said as his classmates posed for photos on the steps of the war memorial in east Berlin.
bq. “The sausages and ice cream are awesome,” Rachel Garrett added.
Anscheinend gibt die Regierung zu, dass die deutsche Geschichte in England nicht optimal unterrichtet wird.
bq. The German foreign ministry says 2,000 schools in the two countries have partnerships, but many German schools are unable to find British ones willing to do exchanges.
The number of students taking A-level German is at an all-time low.
Carelessly, perhaps, I forgot to try the ice cream. (I was generally too full of yummy sossage.)
The most common ice-cream is Italian, where you choose two or three scoops from a range of thirty or forty flavours, either milk icecream or water ice. It’s wonderful. I was surprised when a new icecream shop became famous in Erlangen a couple of years ago. Its scoops were larger and cheaper, and they were creamy, with nuts, but full of synthetic ingredients – luxury versions of the sort of Wall’s ice cream of the old days, rather than something really luxurious like Losely’s or Häagen Dazs. I suppose people just like something different sometimes.
When I first came to Germany in 1971, what really bowled me over were the fruit juices (especially apple, but other fruits as well). We simply didn’t have that sort of thing in the UK at the time (anybody remember Schloer?).
Not only is the number of A-level German students at an all-time low, so is the number of undergraduates studying German in the UK. And standards have definitely fallen, despite what the government claims. I’ve been told by an A-level marker that they’re not allowed to penalise grammatical errors, and that A-level German is nowadays no more than “getting by in German”. This then washes through the entire university system, so you end up with people with a postgrad “translation studies” degree who still don’t know their way around German adjectival endings and can’t conjugate verbs. I really do wonder how many English native speakers will actually be translating in 15-20 years time.
I remember them. They seem to have changed the shape of their bottles: http://www.shloer.com