New answers tagged swiss-standard-german
6
I really like to read Newspapers in German and English. My general experience is that the differences between Austrian Standard German, Federal German Standard German, and Swiss Standard German are very much comparable to the differences between American, Australian, British, Canadian, and Indian English. However, there are barely any spelling differences ...
4
I would like to add that Swiss Standard German (as used by swiss newspapers) no longer uses the letter ß. Instead every ß is rewritten as ss, which would be a mistake in Standard German.
29
Yes, you will. Not only in the Swiss dialects, but also in written Swiss standard German (as used in the press), word and expression usage can differ so significantly that even a native German speaker can have problems at least to capture details in a regular Swiss text.
Some examples are:
Words which are slightly different, but still likely understood, ...
1
With the small exception of words commonly used in a specific region, all "German" newspapers are written in "Hochdeutsch" - which is the common German tongue. If, at a later time, you want to listen to German being spoken, you should make sure that its "Hochdeutsch", best spoken in the region around Hannover
11
Reading a Swiss or Austrian newspaper will increase the likelihood of encountering constructions that may be rejected by Germans as not conforming to the standard.
For instance, note the position of the finite verb in the following sentence:
Man könnte bemängeln, dass die Lenkung einen Tick direkter ausfallen hätte dürfen. NZZ
(instead of hätte ...
3
The Swiss newspapers (as an example NZZ) are grammatically correct and do not show any disadvantage to learning the german language. As in Germany, there are various dialects (language regions) in Switzerland, but this does not affect in a newspaper, dialects are not used there (however, I can only confirm this from Swiss newspapers).
So if you want to learn ...
18
You will encounter vocabulary that isn't widely understood in Germany or Austria. But it's the same the other way.
German speakers have to live with that. The worst thing which could happen is that you are mistaken for a Swiss.
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