The TL/DR of this whole article can be summed up with ‘answer the phone by saying your last name.’ Yes, really.

Unless you know the caller, and it is a friend, answer unknown calls to your personal phone line by saying your last name. Say only your last name and wait for the caller to say who they are and why they are calling.

For some reason, this took me ages to learn. The German classes that I’ve taken don’t really cover this. They teach you how to call other people (restaurants, stores, etc.). And they teach you the way to conduct formal business phone calls as the caller, or sometimes the representative of your company. But, for some reason, not how to answer your regular phone at home.

I mean, I guess it’s not that complicated.

But I kept reflexively saying too much and it was throwing people off. (Well, that and my accent, probably.) Other immigrants will probably know what I mean when I say you could hear the caller thinking, ‘WTF?’ over the line.

I would feel that I had to say, ‘Hallo’ or ‘Ja’ and my whole name, or my name followed by ‘hier’ or any number of things I just insisted on doing because I couldn’t make myself just say one word when answering the phone.

If you try to Google this information, you are going to wade through a ton of unhelpful articles about how to make phone calls, with few of them offering really practical info on how to answer them.

The best I’ve found is this list of 30 German Phone Call Phrases from the GermanPod101 blog.

If you’re like me, you hate talking on the phone to people you don’t know - even in your native language - you’ll have to get over that here. Germans like to conduct business over the phone.

In their personal lives, many Berliners use email, social media and lots of different messaging apps. (WhatsApp is the big one, but I also use Signal and Telegram to keep up with different friends and community groups.)

But medical practices, schools, and other businesses will want you to call to make appointments, or they will want to follow up with you over the phone. (Don’t get me started on government offices that expect you to write a letter or send a fax. They don’t even like the telephone, but that’s a topic for another day.) Even if they have email, they may not check it often, or at all.

And talking on the phone as a non-native speaker is one of the hardest things you can do! You don’t have any visual cues to help you with context. And, people talk faster on the phone.

I wish more German customer-facing people understood this. You don’t have to worry about speaking English, if you would just email or text me in German instead of calling. That way, I can look up any unknown words and there’s no danger of me hearing words wrong and misunderstanding, or missing entire chunks of the conversation while I panic about how to respond.

I’m sure it probably has something to do with data protection that I am not aware of.

For now, this is my small contribution to integration.

-Harris.

—What’s New?—

Reading

Interesting things I’ve read in the news and around the Berlin blogosphere (the BERlogosphere?)

Kreuzberged - Berlin Companion: Now You See It, Now You Don’t - Or, Why Berlin’s First U Bahn Line Vanishes Between Shöneberg and Charlottenburg

Tagesspiegel: So Haben Berlins Kieze Gewählt (How Berlin’s Neighborhoods Voted) h/t Handpicked Berlin

The Berliner: Looted Antiques: Berlin Agrees to Send Stolen Objects Back to Italy

Watching

Welcome to Berlin: Neu in der Stadt is a five-part documentary series that follows five (later six) different young people who have just moved to the city: Larissa is an aspiring stand-up comedian who moves to Berlin from a small village in Rhineland-Palatinate; Evgeny and Sergej are a gay couple who moved to Berlin from Moscow to escape persecution and to be able to live openly as a couple; Stephano is an aspiring hip hop musician who has just found a room in a shared apartment in Prenzlauer Berg; and Jessica, a Korean raised in Italy who wants to overcome her insecurities and develop an independent identity. (In German, with German subtitles.)

Listening

I’m currently binge listening to Dirk Hoffman-Becking’s podcast, History of the Germans.
It’s an interesting, irreverent, but very thorough history of the German people, from the fall of the western Roman Empire through German reunification in 1990.

New episodes once a week.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and stay cool!

-Cathi