Germany One - Text
Female, born Hamburg 1975, parents both teachers of English, senior year of high school spent in Ohio; good, fluent English in slight American accent. Recorded by Paul Meier in Lawrence, KS, USA in 1999.
Transcription of Unscripted Speech
I'm from Germany, from Hamburg, that's a city in the north, and I'm--I actually live in a suburbs, which is a little bit outside of Hamburg, but, it only takes like 20 minutes by car to be right downtown, so uh, it's really nice because we are more out in the green, we're not like, right in the city, but we have all the advantages of a big city too. And um...gosh, um, I grew up--I have a sister, a younger sister, and um, we grew up--grew up in...in a nice neighborhood, a lot of children, and um, small schools, and it was really like--like you imagine it *laughs* in the best way. My parents are both English teachers in high school, so they actually tried to speak English to us, even before we had to take it in school, but um, we didn't really catch on, we--we didn't like that *laughs* so um, I think really which I started in 5th grade, in high school, and um, I had to take it all the way for high school, we have 13 years, and um, I actually...oh gosh, I think, yeah, I think my senior year in high school, I um, spent in Ohio, in United States. And I think that's the first time I really, really learned, how to speak it. Just like, when you have to talk to people, and you're exposed to it 24 hours a day, without any Germans around *laughs* that's like, that's when you have to..really speak it. I think the most difficult is just....certain way to same something, like idioms or, em, what person use um...that's..just stuff you--you use normally, and um we--we--we have different words, we just use truly different words--words in Germany to um...to say the same thing, it's just a different... And um, also um, prepositions are really hard *laughs* there are so many, and um...it's kind of hard to know which preposition goes with what word. And um, I think the 'th' is hard to, because we don't have that sound in Germany. You have different 'R's', that's hard *laughs*. And um, then, sometimes my--my um, 'v' isn't very good, people tell me that, to work on that, and I lived in Kiel for 2 years that's my home univ--kind of my--first university, and um, then I decided to go back to Hamburg. It was kind of right after high school, I decided I would like to move out and see something new, and um, go to a smaller university than the University of Hamburg, and after 2 or 2 and a half years I decided, okay that's it, that's fine, I gonna go back home.
Unscripted Speech Transcribed by Faith Harvey 16 March 2008