For the last several weeks one of the larger projects I’ve been working on is finishing the content entry for a consumer website that will be launching in the next month. The site is for Fabreeka International, a global company that manufactures products to control vibration and shock – their products are used in everything from helipads to construction machinery to household machinery. The catch: this website not only has dozens of products and applications, but the site will be launching in four different language versions: English, UK English, German and Chinese. For five hours at a time for at least several days a week, my job description has literally been ‘copy and paste.’

As I was doing the very manual content-entry process, I noticed how similar the German language content was to the English content. Not only were a lot of the words pronounced much the same, but the sentence structure and grammar seem to be very similar as well. Check it out:

When I was still in school I studied abroad in India and part of the requirement was to take a Hindi language course while we were there; the most difficult part about the language I found was getting the sentence structure down. In Hindi a sentence, if you broke apart each word into English, would go something like this: ‘Dog she to the park walk.’ Because this is not the case with German, it is actually the easiest language to take on if English is your first language. Another cool thing about German is this: many of the countries in Western and Eastern Europe speak German, if not fluently, enough to carry on a conversation. If you’re a traveler, German is definitely one of the most convenient languages to know.

The purpose of this blog: learn German! No, but it’s still pretty cool. Thanks Fabreeka! And to reward my efforts: Kann ich ein Bier bitte haben?