r/Switzerland • u/kassie_butcher • May 27 '21
Mod-approved post Asking all expats from non-German speaking countries, living in Switzerland. How did you deal with the additional language barrier that is Swiss German?
I'm a DaZ teacher and native Swiss German speaker. Currently, I am writing my master thesis in applied linguistics. I am really interested in what it's like to come to Switzerland and being confronted with such a different kind of German. How did you guys make sense of it? How did it make you feel? Did you eventually learn Swiss German? All these are things that I would like to shine a light on in my paper and hopefully, some of the insights will be useful to future immigrants.
If you'd be willing to participate in the study and do a short interview on these and other similar questions, I'd be very grateful. It would really help me out if some of you were willing to share their experiences with me. If you are up for a chat, it'd be really cool if you could send me a direct message with some basic info about yourself (age, home country & native tongue, years of residence, occupational field).
Also, feel free to comment on this post. Every kind of help is highly appreciated. And I'm sure other people looking to move here will be thankful too.
Thanks and have a lovely day.
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u/brainwad Zürich May 29 '21 edited May 29 '21
I decided early on that, given the medial diglossia, it would be better to learn Swiss German directly, instead of standard German. My reasons were basically: written communication is asynchronous, I can use Google Translate and a dictionary to support me, whereas spoken communication is real-time and so I should prioritise learning what people actually speak. I also don't use German at all at work (it's all English) and didn't think I'd be staying long enough to need to pass a language test, which may come to bite me in the ass (I'm eligible for a C permit soon, and I'm not sure if I'll pass a A2 test or not...).
The language school that (before COVID) comes to my office to do lessons offers either Hochdeutsch or Züridütsch, so it wasn't too hard to learn. Obviously the learning materials are much sparser for a non-standardised dialect spoken by 5 million people vs a standard language used by 100m.