Timeline for There is a language/cultural barrier between me and my supervisor, what can I do to improve this situation?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 10, 2016 at 14:43 | comment | added | hownowbrowncow | @shoover Operation paperclip. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 8:01 | comment | added | iamnarra | @FedericoPoloni I just want to point out that I do speak German and I'm told I'm actually good at it. I can even do my tax return in German. But as many of the commenters pointed out, conversational lunchroom German is hard. Not to mention Germans tend to be closed off, so it takes a bit more effort to bring them out of their shell, which is hard to do in a foreign language. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 7:26 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | More importantly, you moved to Germany, and you plan to spend several years there. You are going to need German a lot in your life, not only in the lab. To go shopping, interact with offices where no one speaks English, signing a rental contract, checking local websites... So there is no excuse for not learning it. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 5:26 | vote | accept | iamnarra | ||
| Feb 8, 2016 at 22:31 | comment | added | xLeitix | @dirkk Oh yes. I come from Austria and work in Switzerland. The notion that conversational German would somehow be easy to learn seems completely absurd to me. | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 20:19 | comment | added | peterh | @dirkk This is what foreigners learn and experience in the German language school. The actual hardness and inconventionality of the actual spoken German isn't teached for them. Despite my quite good German I had strong problems as I tried to understand a simple sentence form native speakers. But, the internal logic of the grammar, especially the complex structures of Verbs, I find still very mathematical and beautyful, which is unique to the German. | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 20:06 | comment | added | dirkk | "conversational English is actually pretty tough, whilst German is pretty structured and easy once you know the rules" As a native German speaker: I strongly disagree | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 19:37 | comment | added | shoover | How times have changed. When my father, a U.S. citizen, did his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in the USA in the 1960s, the expectation at that time was that American science/engineering doctoral students would learn German because the scientific/engineering literature at the time was largely written in German. | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 18:10 | comment | added | Wetlab Walter | I suppose it depends on how many people are in his lab :) | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 17:56 | comment | added | xLeitix | "It will be much easier for you to learn German to conversational level than all of your co-workers learn English." That's questionable, given that the OP probably only speaks a little German currently while I would expect most / all scientists in Germany to speak at least passable English. | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 17:32 | history | answered | Wetlab Walter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |