Many years ago I did a PGCE and for my practical I went to the Royal Liberty School in Romford. The German teacher was Aubrey Pope, and he seemed to have a much better idea of how to teach German than the “direct method” we were encouraged to use and which I could never understand (grammar rules should not be taught – doesn’t work for me). Pope would get pupils to drill complex sentences by varying the nouns in them.

The Times Educational Supplement had a series “My best teacher”, where the then MP Norman Baker wrote about Aubrey Pope in a better way than I can.

Aubrey Pope wore John Lennon glasses, a tweed cap and cycled to school on one of those bikes with very small wheels. He rode a bike for environmental reasons, not because he didn’t have a car. He was very “green” long before it became fashionable.

He was unlike any other teacher I ever had. He taught me German and Russian at Royal Liberty school in Essex, and I still remember his first lesson. He taught us a complete sentence in German, which would translate: “After the two children had left the house, they go into the park to play football.”

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Seen in Brentwood: Coming soon – kütchenhaus – the German kitchen.

Apparently these have been around for a while. They seem to be a brand from nobilia and to exist in Germany as Küchenhaus.

Richard Schneider in his blog at uepo.de recently had a post on Marx und Engels über Sprache, Stil und Übersetzung.
He reported on a book on the importance of foreign languages to them: Karl Marx,
Friedrich Engels – Über Sprache, Stil und Übersetzung, edited by Heinz
Ruschinski and Bruno Retzlaff-Kresse,  Dietz Verlag.

They wrote about what language is, but also both spoke several
languages.  From the introduction:

 Von Marx wissen wir, dass er Englisch und Französisch sprach und schrieb, nahezu alle europäischen Sprachen las und auch über gute Kenntnisse des Griechischen und Lateinischen verfügte.

Engels‘ Sprachkenntnisse waren noch umfassender: Er beherrschte etwa 20 Sprachen, davon zwölf aktiv, und kannte von mehreren auch frühere historische Entwicklungsstufen.

Diese intensive Beschäftigung mit Sprachen, die Marx und Engels stets mit dem gründlichen Studium der Geschichte der betreffenden Völker, ihrer Kultur und Literatur verbanden, standen in engstem Zusammenhang mit ihrem publizistischen und theoretischen Schaffen.

Must see statues of Engels in Wuppertal and Manchester. (This is a reconstruction of a rather hasty post).

(Reconstituted post)

Herr Rau, in the LehrerInnZimmer blog, writes about Grußformeln in der Schule. See the comments too. And many thanks to Herr Rau for finding my recent blog posts that had been lost in the ether.

One problem is oral greetings, the other is greetings in writing. In speaking:
„Servus“ geht sehr viel seltener. Zwischen Schülern und Schülerinnen (eher: Schülern) ist das natürlich völlig okay, zwischen Lehrern und Lehrerinnen (eher: Lehrern, und da auch nur von bestimmter Sozialisation) auch. Zwischen Schülerinnen/Schülern und Lehrkräften ist das in der Regel nicht okay, aber zumindest in meiner Gegend verbreitet. Die Schüler und Schülerinnen (eher: Schüler) wissen allerdings nicht, dass das nicht akzeptabel ist.

The comments reminded me how many problems there are in writing emails, for instance, in German and English.

Richtig sind: Mit freundlichen Grüßen, vielen Grüßen, herzlichen Grüße, und wenn Verhältnis und Inhalt tatsächlich innig sind, dürfen die Grüße natürlich auch lieb sein.

I could never work out whether it was safe to write “Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren” to my bank or to my internet provider. Best to start out that way. In translators’ forums, “Liebe Grüße” is common, yet I don’t know all these people so I rarely use it myself. And I also dislike “sonnige Grüße” etc. It took me a while to write “viele Grüße”.I do quite like writing emails without an ending, in this way avoiding “cheers” and “kind regards”. I’ve never adapted to German non-sexist expressions.