| There is no RationalWiki without you. We are a small non-profit with no staff – we are hundreds of volunteers who document pseudoscience and crankery around the world every day. We will never allow ads because we must remain independent. We cannot rely on big donors with corresponding big agendas. We are not the largest website around, but we believe we play an important role in defending truth and objectivity. If everyone who saw this today donated $5, we would meet our goal for 2019. |
Fighting pseudoscience isn't free. We are 100% user-supported! Help and donate $5, $20 or whatever you can today with |
Template:Willkommen
Vielen Dank (at least I think that's what I'm trying to say, according to Google translate)
Prepositions are tricky - I get them constantly wrong in English. Both phrases exist, "willkommen zu" and "willkommen bei". "Willkommen zu" is more formal, but less general: it can only be used for an event, never for place or a person, "willkommen bei" works all the time. So, never say "willkommen zu mir", if you have invited someone to your home, but "willkommen bei mir". OTOH, for a great event, you would prefer to say "willkommen zur Hochzeit unserer Tochter", though "willkommen bei der Hochzeit unserer Tochter" works, too - but doesn't sound perfectly right.
I just remember the phrase from a World Cup commercial in 2006, "Willkommen Zu Football"
Other than a few phrases and words ("arbeit macht frei," ich bin ein berliner," "schnel"-that last one came from a WWII story from my grandfather, apparently the Germans would say schnel a lot to pedestrians), I know no German. But I do know French and Spanish!
Sorry if my examples were a little too World War related. I'm certainly not anti-German you filthy schleu!
On another note, the reason most of the German words and phrases I know are WWII related would be that most of my family's accounts of Germans and most of what I learned of Germany in school was about WWII. I'm digging myself in an ethnic sensitivity hole, aren't I?
No surprise there: most British and American only know a few garbled phrases taken from Hogan's Heroes, sometimes not being correct German words altogether, like "Schweinhund". But I'm often surprised to meet Americans who speak some German - and these are often former soldiers who have been stationed in Germany.
OTOH, the only Russian phrase some Germans know is "dawai, dawai" ("schnell, schnell" - "fast, fast"): a relict of the many German prisoners of war who stayed in the USSR till the late fifties...
So it seems that wars are furthering the exchange of only a few words: let's see which Afghan expressions will come into the English language over the next couple of years...