Cultural Prejudices and Stereo-Types

1. Make a list of typical prejudices and stereo-types that come to your mind about the
“typical” German, US American and British.

2. Compare your results with the rest of the class in a discussion. Write the most typical
prejudices on the board.

3. Now read the typical prejudices US Americans have about Germans. Discuss the text
in class and try to find reasons why those prejudices exist.

4. Collect those ideas and write them down.

Nothing for Ungood

Cultural shock from an American perspective

1) Germans start counting with zero. When you go to a hotel, they will tell you that
your room is on the third floor, when it is actually on the fourth. Germans don’t
understand that counting always starts with 1, not 0. This has the side-effect of
causing Germans to start counting with their thumb.

2) Germans telephone numbers don’t have a fixed amount of digits. In the States we
always have the same number of digits, so that when we give out our phone
number, we kind of have a tune we all sing to. Example: 864-56 43 23. In
Germany you never know when to put your pen down, since the phone number
could be 0472323412232 or 7. They could also tell you it’s forty-seven, twenty-
three, twenty-three etc.

3) Germans don’t know how to work the calendar. First they write the date, month,
and then the year separated by dots (10.12.1958) instead of a month, date, and year
separated by slashes (12-10-1958). But the weirdest thing is that in Germany they
think that the week starts on Monday and not on Sunday as in our calendar.

4) With numbers Germans put the comma where the decimal goes and the decimal
where the comma goes. $0,00 instead of $ 10.00 – or 16,4 % instead of 16.4 %.

5) German manners are a bit on the robust side. Don’t expect an apology if someone
bumps into you on the sidewalk. All you will get is a funny look for being so
selfish and inconsiderate to get in the way.

6) Germans are not good for standing in line (queuing). At a bus stop they will use
their elbows to get in first and get a seat. In supermarkets they will queue, but
grudgingly, and only because there isn’t any choice. In other shops it’s a matter of
judgement.
7) Germans will shake hands at all times. Hand-shaking is an unavoidable fact of life.
You must shake hands when meeting, when leaving, on arriving, on agreeing and
even on disagreeing. Germans believe in a firm handshake.

8) The formal rules of etiquette are simple. When meeting someone for the first time,
address them as “Sie“, and continue to do so until the informal “Du“ becomes
absolutely unavoidable. Germans will retain on “Sie” terms with colleagues or
neighbours even after decades.

9) Germans love their cars more than almost anything. German cars are pampered,
primped and squeaky clean. Only a foreigner would drive around with a dirty car
and will get disapproving glances from people on the street.

10) Small talk is an expression, which has no German equivalent so Germans use the
English expression. Germans prefer the informal exchange of opinions to
concentrate on more serious matters – like the enormous stress they are under, the
terrible pressure of work, their hardships, or the symptoms of their stress condition.
Other popular topics are holidays and how much they need one, how much they
had to work last week and why they really need a holiday now and why they even
have to work harder next week.

11) Germans aren’t very patriotic towards their country and they don’t know their own
national anthem.

12) Germans love their beer and their beer is of excellent taste and quality. However,
they hate Root Beer! They think it tastes like cough syrup, despite the fact that
Root Beer is delicious.

13) Germans change their spelling system as soon as you have learnt it. By the time
you know the difference between das and daß, daß doesn’t exist anymore, and in
its place you have words like Schifffffahrt.

Germans have a remarkably flexible language, one in which new words are made
up. You simply take two or three existing ones and stick them
alltogetherabitlikethis. For instance, in a park you will find a sign that says
Astbruchgefahr, which would translate into “branch-dropping-off-danger”.