Hello , I'm Bulgarian and I have ambitions to study in Zurich, but I don't speak German , which is recommended from the Universities. I want to ask you how could I go there and learn German language for a year and then go on. If someone knows something useful about this please write it. Thank you very much !

Put simply with great difficulty. I would suggest going to live in Heidelberg Germany for a year and then once you have got a grip on the language you can apply for a place in Zürich. Put simply non-EU (old EU) people are not particularly welcome unless they have something to offer and I guess you are a few years away from that. As a student you should be alright but for that you need a place at university which will be somewhat difficult without German language...

depending on ur age au pairing is a pretty good option...i mean im pretty young and thats what im doing at the moment...ur host family pays half of the fees so its a pretty good deal....just an idea??

Question, I will be living in Glattbrugg when I move to Switzerland in a few months, can anyone suggest a school or some type of institution I can get into to master the language (your basic crash course). I have been studying it on my own for several months now but want to perfect my reading/writing/speaking ability.

Thanks!

Chris, search the site. There are very lengthy threads on schools in Zurich.

Problem is that most of the "German Speaking" Swiss don't really speak German. They speak something like:

Y ha öppis nachtassä gagassä. Mir habe vyl Zyt zum schaffä. Oder min Liebstä: Y bi dr Gang go.

All of this looks and sounds nothing like "German", and it isn't it's an dialect that is almost as different from High German as Dutch is. The second sentence is a killer. Took me two years to figure that out. In high german it would be Wir haben viel Zeit zum arbeiten. "We have plenty of time to work". But, Mir is a first person pronoun in High German. Whew!

The good news, is that once you learn High German, learning Swiss German is easier, as Swiss German's grammar is much more like that of English. In fact, in the Swiss German class I took, it was actually easier for me than the Germans and the French speaking Swiss that were in the class.

I still get really lost between the lowland dialects and the Walser dialect that my wife and her family speak. It's a beautiful dialect, but many Swiss I know admit that they have a hard time understanding it.

Apparently there's also a good Alsatian-English dictionary out there someplace that would probably be a good thing to find. Alsatian is pretty close to the Basel dialect.

Intensive classes can be good to learn a bunch of stuff at a quick rate, but be careful, you can get really burned out on learning the language.

And a final bit of advice. Learning a language all depends on the teacher you have. I've been lucky to have some pretty good teachers.

Good Luck!

I'd have thought that the third one is more difficult! (For the others: "Gang go +infinitive" is a Swiss German imperative form. So if you're the "Gango", everybody tells you what to do"). Gregv, you can call yourself a real master of the Basel dialect if you understand these carnival poems.

Gang go isn't to bad. Y gang go poste, I'm gonna go shopping. Much like english. And the term Gang go, is directly translated to Gopher/Go for. I'm the Gopher (I go fer this, I go fer that).

Once when I was at a dinner with a few Swiss friends, I was asked if I knew what the 'Gang go Klub' was by the men there. I said that yes, I'm a member, and the Swiss men laughed and said they were also members. You have to be married to be in the 'Gang go Klub'. ;-)

The Schnitzelbank are pretty tough to figure out even if you're Swiss. On top of that, they usually have double or triple meanings. They're some of the best word-play in the German language. Always read them out loud to your self to try to figure out what's going on, then have your Swiss significant other explain them to you. Thanks for the link. The one we thought was great last year was the commentary over Chrstoph Blocher's daughter buying the Basler Lecherli company. It was something like: "Well, Zuricher Geschnetletes (a traditional culinary dish, in case you don't know) doesn't have any Zurichers in it, so why should Basler Lercherli have any Baslers". ;-)