You should only love people, and only people you’ve chosen to, and only with all your heart – and you don’t need to tell them about it every two seconds.
You shouldn’t love vegan sausages and the glitter episode of Peppa Pig and Kreuzkölln on a Saturday night. Remember how people in Anne of Green Gables books complain about the youngsters overusing the word love? Germans are like old people in Anne of Green Gables – they think love is hard and special and heavy and sacred. I whispered to him: “Tell them you love them!” And he shouted down from the top of the balcony: “ Ich habe euch ganz gern!”īut it’s not just a translation issue, to be fair. My son and I (he was about three at the time) were waving them off in their car. My first husband’s – that does, I admit, make it sound like I have 74 husbands’ skeleton rotting away in the cellar – parents were leaving. Like, if you were a translator – and I am not – and you were translating someone leaving the house one morning – “Love you, Mum! See you later!” You would translate that as “ Habe dich lieb, Mama! Bis später!” The thing is, this is what you have to realize: the English words “I love you” literally mean less than the German words ich liebe dich.
It means less than I love you, which they really save for special occasions. They have each other’s love – sie haben sich lieb. “I told them I had them lieb once a year. “You never told your parents you loved them?” You’ve turned our kids into mushy Americans! My son tells me he loves me every day!” Do you think I ever told my parents I loved them? It’s all the English speakers’ doing. “This is your doing,” he said to me in English once the boys were gone. “ Ich liebe dich auch, Kleiner!” He whispered back and our boys ran off to throw sticks in a puddle. Think of Özil that time he scored a goal during the friendly between Germany and Turkey. His dad grinned, beamed and kind of winced all at the same time. “I love you, Dad!” The kid said, in his perfect German: “ Ich liebe dich, Papa!” It makes me feel so nostalgic, thinking about it now, this innocent, kind of nice role reversal at the playgrounds – the kids feeding us for once – even if the thing they fed us was actually cold, wet sand. “Here you go Dad.” He also handed his Dad a plastic cup of wet sand. “Here’s some ice-cream for you,” he said in perfect German. Nicht essen.”Įast German Dad at the Spielplatz’s kid came up to him. “Mmmmmn,” I said, and made what I thought to be loud coffee drinking noises.
#I love you in german full#
My son came up to me and gave me a plastic cup full of wet sand.“Coffee!” He said. We were having about as much fun as it is humanly possible to have in a Spielplatz in Germany, basically. I remember one time, last summer, sitting with a German dad at the Spielplatz and indulging in the German equivalent of small talk – swapping anecdotes about horrific Amt experiences, complaining about the Senat, and every now and then he’d throw in a tragic GDR story, like maybe about a deaf child drowning to death in the bath tub or something, just for fun. literally three weeks ago, I used to go to playgrounds. Jacinta Nandi rants about the meaning of “I love you” in Germany.
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