das Denglisch

I can think of at least two readers of my blog who have already noticed this trend, but I need to bring it to everyone's attention before I embarrass myself. My English is trash. Seriously. Writing blog posts brings it to my attention, but when I speak English, I've lost my flare for word play. Let me give you a taste of what I running through my head right now. The rest of this post, I'll write only correcting typographical errors. I'm gonna go back and add in the appropriate translations, and I'll bold the text whose word order or phraseology is weird but would sound fine if translated into German.

Most of the problems stem from the fact that the deutsche (German) words come leichter (more easily) in my head, and I always have to überlegen (consider) what is the richtige Wort auf (correct word in) English. It usually happens with not commonly used words in English, like trainstation or marketplace (both are one word in German). There are also other words that have a very specific meaning in German and I use them in German because I hear them so oft (often) in only German. For example, das wort (the word) Anmeldung means registration, but specifically in my case it means registration with the city. There is also the verb anmelden, and when you conjugate it you break off the an- and put it at the end of the Satz (sentence). So I will say sentences like “I have not yet melded with the stadt (city) an.” I have problems like this with sentencebau (sentence construction). And I usually get a Mischung (mixture) out of German and Inglisch (English pronunciation with German spelling rules) sentence order when I speak. Or if I'm trying to erklär (clarify) something precisely in Englisch (the -sch gets me every time) I always have to pause and get the sentence right in my head before I speak it out. Deswegen (a fantastic word that means “because of that”) sound ich (I) like a moron or some sort of person who can speak well. Aber in der Tat, bin ich sehr klug, und gut with my wörter. (But in fact, I am intelligent and good with words)

Ok, holy crap. I've got to stop this. Writing like that is legitimizing the problems I make all the time and will probably make me slip completely into German by the end of the post.. Now, I'll go back to correcting everything I say. The word Denglisch is what we call the mixture of German (Deutsch) and English that we speak everyday. We can all understand each other, but anyone speaking only pure English or German, would get lost pretty easily.

In other news, my English spelling is really going downhill. I tried to look up the word “maneuver” today only to realize that I have absolutely no idea how to spell it. Even after writing it down, all of the possibilities looked ridiculous.

On a scale of 1 to 10, allowing myself to write that way has totally destroyed my ability to compose in English, and I'm going to have to end this post early. I guess the moral of the story is that, If you notice me speaking more simplistically, or if you notice that I no longer know how to use a comma the proper prepositions, don't think I'm illiterate.