von Christine Burgmer | Okt. 22, 2026 | Sparks |
He didn’t know the session had started One of my clients, a managing director on the finance side, used to get restless after about three minutes. We’d be talking about the weekend or how the quarter was going, and he would shift in his seat and ask if we...
von Christine Burgmer | Okt. 21, 2026 | Sparks |
You can’t meet a football pitch A client was telling me about an indoor football place near his house. He said, “You can meet the pitch for an hour.” He meant hire. Mieten was sitting there in his head, close enough to meet that his mouth took it and...
von Christine Burgmer | Okt. 20, 2026 | Sparks |
He didn’t know the word. He described it instead. A client was telling me about a material his company makes. He didn’t have the English word for how thick it is. He kept going anyway. He said it was smooth like a smoothie, then thicker than yoghurt, then...
von Christine Burgmer | Okt. 19, 2026 | Sparks |
Her emails don’t sound like her A client I started working with recently is finding her spoken English again after thirty years away from it. We go slowly. We laugh a lot. Then her emails arrive. Fluent, well turned, the odd idiom in exactly the right place. I...
von Christine Burgmer | Okt. 16, 2026 | Sparks |
Accusative or dative, that is the question For years I couldn’t reliably choose between „ich gehe in den Wald“ and „ich gehe im Wald spazieren“. Accusative or dative, depending on whether you’re going there or already there. I...
von Christine Burgmer | Okt. 15, 2026 | Sparks |
Become or bekommen? The mistake that never cost anyone anything „I will become a steak.“ It’s the most famous mistake German speakers make in English, and most of you met it in a classroom, probably with laughter attached. Here’s the part...
