I've been trying to learn German. I think I can now amend this to "I've been learning some German", because yesterday at work I understood fully 90% of a politely heated conversation about booking holiday vacation time via the company intranet ("No! If you don't come in on the BLUE days, it's an automatic vacation - otherwise the time is just subtracted from your total." "I think you are wrong." "You are the one who is wrong."...etc. Blows were narrowly avoided.)
The month of intensive language courses I took - four days a weeks, three hours a day, after work - was exhausting but undoubtedly useful. That was in September, and since then the world around me has been slowly turning into something I understand again. I've gone from doing mental happy dances at any intelligible overheard conversation (my first triumph: "Maximillian! How many times do I have to tell you?") to being annoyed when I can't understand. I still sound like an idiot three-year-old when I try to speak in German myself, but with more courses coming up in January, I hope to soon progress to the level of a five-year-old who's a just a little slow.
A fun upside of trying to learn German at work is the hilarious Austrian idioms, slang, and bizarre contractions my colleagues use. Of late, my favourite is the Upper Austrian phrase, "Auf, und der Kuh nach!" You say it when you want someone to get up and leave with you, and Juergen translated it as "Get up and follow the cow", but I prefer the word-for-word translation of "Up, and after the cow!". It calls to mind frantic Austrian farmers charging pell-mell through hilly pastures, shouting at neighbouring farmers to help them or, God forbid, there'll be no cheeses this Christmas!
I've also had my first sweet taste of being able to talk right in front of someone who has no clue what you're saying. This is snobby and mean, and I haven't done it very much at all, but one of my friends here is a fellow Canadian intern who's dating a Turkish-Austrian girl, and it is endlessly entertaining to discuss Turkish football with his girlfriend while he thinks we're talking about him.
Lastly and most obviously, there are some things that just sound hilarious in German. Of course, it's full of crazy-ass compound nouns. Why call it a fridge when you can call it a "cold cupboard"? Doesn't a shootout make more sense as an "eleven meter kicking"? One of the undisputed kings of these is the Donaudampfshiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenskajuetenschluesseloch, or the keyhole of the door to the cabin of the captain of a steamship company operating on the Danube. I'm still trying to find a way to work it into a sentence. A shorter but no more practical example is the sign displayed in the window of a nearby supermarket, proclaiming "Monday is Banana Day!". It would be funny anyway, but the fact that "Bananentag" is one word makes it gold.
In conclusion, languages are fun, and German is extra fun because you can essentially invent words whenever you want. Eat your heart out, Shakespeare.
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Have you tried the phrase, "Mensch, du hast ein Voegel!" (It's actually Vogel with an umlaut over the o, but I don't know how to do that on my keyboard)? I think I might have told you about it before, but it was slang from my German textbooks in the States which, hilariously, were from the 70s. The phrase basically means, "Dude, you're crazy!", but literally means, "Man, you have a bird!". I think you should give it a go and see what reaction you get.
Keep the funny slang coming! I have an Austrian friend here to impress (and other friends to annoy by speaking funny German phrases like Montag ist Bananentag! Although that one doesn't make much sense to say in any context...)
Also: "die Kuh", right? Or is it when you refer to a man as a "Kuh" you would use "der"?
It's "der Kuh" because it's dative. Cases suck.
Sigh.... 6 articles for 16 kinds of nouns (right?). Inflammable means flammable.
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