Where you need it
Not sorted by part of speech but by the moment: what is actually said in that situation, in the order it arrives.
The direction is the same as everywhere here — understanding first. Most of these lines are said to you; the few you would say yourself are marked.
Everyday Zurich
The shop, the tram, the stairwell, the telephone, the lunch table. Situations almost everybody is in every week — and where the room switches to Standard German the moment it notices you are struggling.
Every line is machine-checked against Zurich forms: forms from other dialects or from Germany do not get through.
At the shop
Four questions, the same ones every time, at a till with a queue behind you — which is exactly where asking somebody to repeat themselves costs the most.
20 lines14 to understand
On the tram
Announcements and strangers, both of them fast. The one situation where not following costs you the afternoon rather than the sentence.
20 lines14 to understand
In the stairwell
The laundry room, the bike in the hallway, the rubbish. A note on the door is not a request here — somebody who reads it as one becomes the difficult neighbour without ever being told.
20 lines15 to understand
On the telephone
The hardest channel in any second language and the one nobody practises: no face, no context, and a stranger working through a list.
20 lines14 to understand
At the restaurant
Four fixed questions and one that decides the bill. «Zäme oder separat» is asked once, quickly, and getting it wrong is noticed by the whole table.
20 lines13 to understand
At work
The meeting runs in Standard German or English. The corridor, the coffee machine and the moment something is actually decided do not.
20 lines15 to understand
At the kindergarten
Kindergarten in the canton of Zurich is conducted in dialect — the electorate decided that in 2011. A parent who learned Standard German finds out at the parents' evening, in front of everybody.
20 lines15 to understand
At the lunch table
The scene this product exists for. The table switches to Standard German the moment it notices you are struggling — withdrawing exactly the thing that would have helped.
20 lines16 to understand
At the doctor's
The phone got you a time; now come the front desk, the waiting room and the consulting room. The desk asks fast, the doctor asks precisely — and in both, what matters is that you understood the question before you answer it.
22 lines17 to understand
At the Gemeinde
Everybody who moves to Zurich registers — usually in the first weeks, and usually before they can follow a sentence. The questions are the same every time, and the person behind the glass asks them a hundred times a day, at that speed.
22 lines17 to understand
In the laundry room
The plan on the wall is a law nobody explains. Leave the filter uncleaned or wash on the wrong day and you will hear about it — rarely to your face, usually on a note.
22 lines17 to understand
At an apéro
A glass in hand, nobody obliged to stay, everybody in dialect. This is where a Zurich acquaintance begins — and «Mer sött emal öppis zäme mache» is meant warmly, but it is not an invitation.
22 lines16 to understand
When no does not sound like no
Zurich rarely refuses outright. «Das isch ächli schwierig» or «Mer chönnt sich das überlegge» is often already the answer, politely wrapped — and whoever takes it literally waits for something that has already been said.
22 lines17 to understand
Dealing with a Bünzli
«Bünzli» is Zurich's word for the neighbour who knows the house rules and enforces them — laundry day, quiet hours, the cardboard. It is rarely meant badly. Argue and you lose; thank them and ask where it is written, and you have peace.
22 lines15 to understand
Care and nursing homes
A resident with dementia loses her second languages first. What is left is the Zurich German of her childhood — and that is the language the shift runs in.
Every line is machine-checked against Zurich forms: forms from other dialects or from Germany do not get through.
The handover
Colleague to colleague, nothing slowed down, nobody switching to Standard German on your account. The fastest speech of the day, and the part that decides the whole shift.
20 lines17 to understand
The morning
Short sentences said while both hands are busy. Standard German is not the neutral option here: switching language mid-care reads as a switch of person.
20 lines8 to understand
When something hurts
Pain does not speak a second language. Somebody reporting it is not composing — and somebody who misreads it takes pain for agitation.
20 lines11 to understand
Meals
The situation that comes round most often and that nobody prepares for, because it sounds like the easy one.
20 lines9 to understand
Restlessness in the evening
Somebody wants to go home, to a home that has not existed for forty years. What helps is short, in the present tense, and in the language the person is thinking in.
20 lines9 to understand
Visitors
Suddenly you are the institution. The daughter arriving on a Sunday afternoon judges the home by whether the person at the door could follow her.
20 lines9 to understand