Graz–Jan. 21, 2025
No pictures today, and not a tremendously eventful day either. After class, I went back to City Park to the Magenta 🇦🇹 (AKA T-Mobile) store to get a SIM card and month-to-month plan. I ended up with the 50GB plan, unlimited SMS and talk minutes in Austria and the EU, all for €17,90 per month. Such a deal!
The person at the store slowed down his speech a bit, so I was able to do the entire transaction in German. When I read a contract at a store in the US, I say “your firstborn child...” as I am reading it, and that always gets a chuckle from the salesperson. I did it in German: „deine erstgeborenes Kind...“ and sure enough it worked here too.
Quote Marks
Here’s some filler text to make the page look like it has more content than it really does! You may have noticed from previous posts that the quote marks in German are different from those in English. For the record, I try to always use what are called typographically correct quotes in English. Here’s a brief tutorial:
These are straight-up-and-down quotes. You should never use them in a formal document unless you are showing computer code.
"abc"
Here are the typographically correct quotes in English. Your word processor has a setting to automatically provide them for you when you press the key on your keyboard. This is almost always what you want.
“abc”
And here they are in German. The opening quote is at the baseline of the letters. The colloquial word for quotation marks is „Gänsefüßchen“ (little geese feet). From their shape, you can think of them as 99-66 quotes.
„abc“
Sometimes you will see guillemets (the angle quote marks like they use in France) with German text. The opening and closing quotes are reversed from the usage in France. Go figure.
»abc«