Template:Willkommen

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...