You might be interested in these.

http://www.englishforum.ch/language-...ss+german+high
Would you like to have Swiss German as an official language in place of High German?
Learning German = Better English?
Do you feel the need to learn the language of other regions?
French or German -which is easiest to learn?
Situations make me NEED to learn Swiss German
German now - SwissGerman later?

I am thinking about buying a set of Pimsleur CDs to supplement my German tutoring sessions before moving to Zurich.

After reading through posts on EF, it seems like lots of ppl recommend learning German, and not to bother with Swiss German due to its various dialects. I have zero knowledge of German and will start private tutoring of German next week. Should I just get the German CDs then and not to bother with learning Swiss German? Would you recommend still getting the Swiss German CDs anyways?

One other question is that some comments about the Pimsleur's Swiss German CDs seem to suggesst that the phrases are sometimes out of date. Does anyone have any experience with the CD?
[comments with out of date phrases:http://www.amazon.com/Swiss-German-U...164801&sr=1-3]
[very good comments of the same product: http://www.amazon.com/Pimsleur-Swiss...7165070&sr=1-1]

I would stick with high German in the beginning and then gradually switch.

With high German, you can at least write as well. You didn't quite
say whether you will be working or what you will be doing. If you
need to communicate for work, I would DEFINITELY choose high
German. They all understand high German.

I will be working in Zurich, but the office is very international and the official language for work is English. My manager, whom I've met already, speaks English fluently. I just want to learn German or Swiss German b/c I thought it would be a neat opportunity.

I would learn high German. My assumption is that you will
be working in a financial institution or accounting firm.

Am I correct?

It is my personal suggestion. Start speaking German with colleagues
on coffee breaks, etc. Eventually you will build up vocabulary enough
to do business in German though it might take a few months.

I am quite fluent, but then again I have been here for 5 years
or so.

Definitely High German first. You will find that living here you will automatically absorb the Swiss German, but as you said, there are many dialects of which Züri is just one.

You can also get Swiss German courses once you consider yourself fluent enough. And then you should buy yourself a Mani Matter CD.

.......................

You were misinformed, to my knowledge no classes were or are teached in Swiss German. We can observe the opposite trend, canton Zurich made High German mandatory for kindergarten.

Other than that, I think you make some good points here.

Our son is in Kindergarten and they will officially start to use High German next year . In the mean time , all the kids ( including the Swiss Kids ) have to learn High German twice a week to ensure they are prepared . The kindergarten teacher told me that they are doing this because they realised that kids who speak dialect ( Swiss German ) outside of school find it hard to cope when they start primary school etc. Also , the standard of written german among a lot of the young graduates these leave a lot to be desired .
So , High German for sure . Swiss German you will definitely pick up from your daily life ( faster if you have kids who in school )

....................................

This is a fascinating thread - I had no idea there were such differences in High German versus Swiss German. Since I want to learn German to speak with as many German speakers as possible, I think it sounds like I'll need to learn the High German language instead of Swiss. Has anyone used the Rosetta Stone system to learn foreign languages? I'm planning on using it to learn German (assuming they only offer High).

On a side note, this is a topic I have always found fascinating - that is, the divergence of languages into dialects. Sadly, divergence like this seems to weaken the language. Being a student of the Celts, I learned that, for example, Irish is broken into at least three dialects, and the Irish government can't agree on a "standard" dialect to teach in schools. As a result, students are being taught wildly varying dialects that not all speakers can follow, and so Irish has limited utility, even in Ireland. Conversely, the Welsh kept their language fairly "pure", and made it a point to standardize certain words that had become slang. Thus, the Welsh language is much more strongly established in Wales than Irish is in Ireland.

Morgannon

About deciding which is the official dialect ... in 1982 they decided on one compomise version of Romanish, which has become official in written form, while the spoken versions live on.

(in English)
http://www.all-about-switzerland.inf...-language.html
http://www.swissworld.org/en/people/...ther_dialects/

(in German)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumantsch
http://www.liarumantscha.ch/uploads/...ntsch_04_d.pdf

I didn't realize there are different versions of Irish Gaelic. And how similar is it to the other gaelics (Scottish / Welsch / Breton / Cornish / Manx?)

Graham

About learning for children

There is a lively discussion running on the Homeschooling group at the
moment on the topics of how children learn and how to learn mutiple languages at the same time (easy!)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homeschoolingch/

Membership is I think restricted to those who are educating their children at home or thinking about it. (The rules of the different cantons vary a lot.)

>Since I want to learn German to speak with as many German speakers
>as possible, I think it sounds like I'll need to learn the High German
>language instead of Swiss. Has anyone used the Rosetta Stone system
>to learn foreign languages? I'm planning on using it to learn German

Quote: "to learn German, some homeschoolers use Rosetta Stone, I think it's good but a bit expensive" Also for French.

Another alternative - "online courses e.g. Oklahoma State University online
German program"

From the group: "I cannot claim to be a language expert...here are some anecdotes which some fluent French and German foreign language speakers could maybe analyze...

I've heard that English takes 3 days to learn, French 3 months to learn and German 3 years to learn....That's clearly oversimplified, but meant to show the difficulty...My second son says he doesn't know, because all languages are hard for him BUT that he has heard that deaf people think that German is easier than French or English because there are fewer exceptions...How's that for contradictory reports...

Personally I find German harder because of all the cases and therefore endings that change depending on how the word is used in the sentence, plus there are masculine, feminine and neuter, while French has M and F and English no dif ..."

My children spoke first English at home, learned a bit of high German from baby TV shows, then learned Swiss-German quickly in kindergarten, and High German reluctantly through primary school. (Nowadays it would be quicker as teachers in theory use High German.) Then French and Italian in secondary school and on trips, losing it through lack of practice, regaining it on holidays and with courses.

Graham

It was a surprise to me too that there are different versions of Irish Gaelic. Very complicated!

Basically, there are two Gaelic language branches - the Brythonic, or "p" Celtic, and the Goidelic, or "q" Celtic branches. These names derive from the ending consonant for "son of" - Mac, or Mc in the "q" Celtic, Ap in the "p" Celtic. Welsh, Breton and Cornish are Brythonic. Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx are Goidelic. I'm not a fluent speaker in any of these languages, but it seems to me like the q Celtic languages are very similar - Irish and Scots Gaelic the most similar of them all.

It's very interesting to see how people are trying to keep these languages alive - the Welsh have probably the most solid language presence, with Breton being a close second. Irish is struggling. Scots is almost extinct, although there's a fierce revivalist movement. The last native speaker of Manx died in the '70's, although there are some few speakers today. Cornish has been extinct, I believe, since the 1600's, although there are a few "scholastic" speakers.

Morgannon

Although it's really annoying when people automatically speak to me in Swiss German, we have to understand that it is their mother tongue. Our mother tongue is the most comfortable language and without thinking that's the language that comes straight out of our mouth. I guess also a lot of english speaking people don't have experience in living in amongst so many different languages. I'm from Australia, we only speak english so it is a shock with so many different languages flying around. But I don't think we can get angry at the swiss, let's face it whatever language they speak back to us, english, swiss german or high german, someone will be unhappy with the choice they made in what language to speak to us. It's really not their fault that swiss german is not a written language. It all has to do with the separation of people by the mountains (also the cantons), they didn't always have tunnels to connect communities, so there was major isolation. This lead to different dialects coming about that weren't actually written. Switzerland is a very special country with 4 languages well actually 5 including high german, so there is bound to be confusion. I guess we all just have to work out how to best deal with it individually and what works best for us. I'm really struggling with german, although everyone says i'm doing really well, it is hard that I can't understand Swiss German. It's going to be a long journey, for those of us who have married a swiss and plan to live here. Chins up