Climb to the Stars - Latest Comments in Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

arnaud — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:49:17 -0000

My previous comment was inaccurate, I'm sorry for having posted without diagnosis enough.

In fact, I was not speaking of a new behaviour, I was just mentionning cookie problems which unset my language preference.

Anyway, getting french for a guy from France is probably more appropriate than getting german for an internaut from Switzerland.

Sorry for my previous complaint :-)

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

arnaud — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:04:06 -0000

And what about last.fm from today ?

... I get the website in french instead of english which irritates me much.

Perhaps and unfortunately you may have it in german :(

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

marcel bernet — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 04:17:13 -0000

helllo stephanie, i set up an english version of the blogcamp-bernetblog-survey, see http://bernetblog.ch/2007/0...
and at the same time apologies that my focus is on german - at least for our blog. but i might be switching more often...

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Maira Carvalho — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 06:49:12 -0000

eBay for me is also a pain... Not only it defaults to German, as it simply doesn't have the French interface. Or at least I haven't been able to find it, as the instructions would be in German. And whoever writes the descriptions, does so in German as well. Once I bought an ADSL modem hoping it would not be broken, as I couldn't tell as much from reading the description.

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Marc Melliger — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 16:38:00 -0000

You are probably right. As I live in Zurich (attended at blogcamp, too) I've never had this sort of problems but I must admit that it would look quite strange if all those Interfaces "étaient en français". (Altough I speak and understand French quite well and I think it's a beautiful language)

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

nyokk — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:49:12 -0000

a standardized language is so much easier

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

leo — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:13:20 -0000

It's even hard to explain the Asians and Aussis that nobody on the world speaks "Swiss". But after some time I get used with it, it may be hard to understand for them that a country with 7 mio. people (in a lot bigger Asian citys live more people than that) speaks 4 language.

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Stephanie — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 15:50:26 -0000

Manual trackback: http://www.davidroessli.com...

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Lyne — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:30:05 -0000

I sooo agree with you. It drives me nuts. I can't use Paypal or eBay because I don't understand German well enough. It's so frustrating. I live near Lausanne and speak French and English, but I hate German. What can we do to force these big companies to listen to us ?

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Marco Cortesi — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:14:49 -0000

I agree too... :-(

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Mark Jaroski — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:07:51 -0000

Modifoo, That's really funny. The thing is that as an anglophone I get the same feeling in Holland. I always think that in a couple of minutes it'll kick in and I'll just start understanding them. Of course it never happens.

Meanwhile, it appears that Jyte users agree unanimously. I suppose I should have linked to your blog post on the subject rather than mine. But of course that one does lead back here. -mark

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Stéphane — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:32:48 -0000

Tu peux ajouter Skype à ta liste ;-) Mieux... quand on a sélectionner le français, le titre de la page reste en allemand. ABE

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

modifoo — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:38:20 -0000

As someone born & raised in Germany, I can only confirm that Swiss-German is hard to understand. While living in England, I had a Swiss friend. Whenever I visited him, and heard his family talk Schweizerdütsch, I had the weird feeling, that I really ought to understand them, but I plainly didn't. (The same sort of thing happened to me in Holland.)

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Cyril — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:06:15 -0000

Thank you for telling exactly what I've been feeling for a while. eBay and Paypal are certainly the worse example. I've been sending them several emails (constantly ignored) and what makes me even more angry is the fact that they have proper and functionnal french language interface for other countries.

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Mark Jaroski — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:10:02 -0000

I've filed this bug report with pay-pal twice, and even phoned it it. The first time they sent me a detailed explaination of how to set my country to Switzerland.

Now myspace is doing it too. Great.

-mark

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Nicolas Sierro — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:55:24 -0000

Yes, improvement is needed with language, but also with the content itself. I can remember when yahoo, msn, etc. decide to enter the Swiss market and just brought content from Germany, France and Italy. The majority of news, sport, etc. was not fitted for the Swiss people and these attempts from the big players failed (have a look on .ch websites and now look at the .fr, .de, .it … and you will appreciate). At the end it gave space for the local players to survive and now to be leader here. That’s good!

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

justgraham — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 10:29:26 -0000

This drives me nuts. Add Blogger and therefore Google who often get their knickers in a twist.

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Marco — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:32:46 -0000

I strongly agree with you. Usually, my opinion is that we all have to learn English and make it the only intra-national language in Switzerland. Working as researcher, I know very good how difficult is to speak/write English instead of my language, but I prefer English to German. I prefer to spend my energy learning English, not German.
Anyway, we can't ignore that lot of people do not understand English.

Re: Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

Biddy — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:14:36 -0000

I feel your pain. I live in France but my first language is English, and having people make assumptions about what language I speak based on my IP address is SO annoying.