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English - ze second language of Germany

Stefan Tilkov,

One of ze nice sings about us Germans is zat we are extremely fluent in Englisch. Listen, for example, to zis gentleman talk about ze nice city of Dortmund.

(Found via Dirk Hesse’s rather cynical, but excellent and often outrageously funny Ligne Claire weblog (German))

On December 14, 2003 11:33 PM, Hendrik Schreiber said:

Oh, how sad. I am an alumni of Dortmund University and am glad that not everyone there has such poor English pronunciation. I hope somebody wrote to the webmaster recommending to take this rather embarrassing sound file ‘off the air’. On the other hand - somebody made the effort of creating a greeting in a foreign language. That’s great! I recently went up to Washington DC with my parents and visited the famous Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/ - definitely worth seeing. Unfortunately my parents hardly speak any English, so it was quite annoying to be pushed around by very unfriendly security personnel, just to discover that the library offers English information material only. Not even Spanish or any Asian language. That’s a lot worse than some German having a poor English pronunciation. Especially when considering that “The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, and it serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with more than 126 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves” (taken from the official website).

On December 15, 2003 8:37 AM, Stefan Tilkov said:

I actually believe that this is quite funny, and whoever selected that gentleman probably did so on purpose.