Here in Germany, as far as I can tell, they don’t have a sweet dessert that’s like a North American pie.
There’s no apple pie, no pumpkin pie, no pecan pie, etc. The latter two have come up recently in conversations with folks here, since those are the traditional Thanksgiving desserts in my family. As usual in these situations, I’m struck by how hard it is to describe a pie to someone who has never seen or eaten one.
It’s not the lack of the pie as a sweet dessert that really is the issue today. After all, for desserts they do have many, many types of wonderful cakes here, for example.
No, the reason I bring this up now is because yesterday the teacher had to explain the german word Stück in class. The teacher typically uses only German to explain a new word, often by explaining something about the meaning, and/or by drawing a picture on the board of the item (if it’s a noun). Stück is a noun; it means “piece” in German.
Now, if you’re an English speaker, think about that for a second. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind if I asked you to draw a picture of something as an example of a “piece” of something? I’d never thought about it before today, but the first thing that comes to my mind is drawing a circle, dividing the circle into 6 “triangles,” calling each one of those a “piece of pie”. What I’ve really drawn is a pie chart diagram, not literally a picture of a cherry (or other) pie, of course. But you can use the pie chart diagram drawing as a shorthand way to draw a “pie”, and since pies are usually served in pieces, people who know what pies are can easily get it.
But, in a land where there is no pie, what do you draw? Well, you still turn to desserts: the teacher drew a cake, and then a piece of that cake, on the board.
However, there was no shortcut to drawing it – she had to draw a 3D-ish cake, and then a 3D-ish piece of that cake to make it clear that the Stück was just the piece of the cake, not anything else on the cake (e.g. decorations, candles, etc.), or the plate the piece was on. It was quite the complicated little drawing for one word.
Now, I have no great conclusions to draw here, it was just that all these thoughts occurred to me while watching my teacher make that cake picture on the board. I guess drawing a picture to illustrate “a piece of something” in German is hardly a “piece of cake“… even when it actually is one. 😉
Wonder why she didn’t draw a sausage and then a piece. They do eat it, don’t they. Less complicated than a piece of cake.
Funny, even if you don’t eat pie, most of us in the USA would recognize it.
funny. So they have no pie charts! Cake charts of course. I was going to say piece of cake too. You are such a clever young woman. These little snipetts of learning a language, are really great for that book you are writing. I love learning about the words, and how you get to class taking pictures and learning stuff, what you eat. When I come there, I will make a pumpkin pie. Then you can show it to your friends. It is not hard to make just need canned or fresh pumpkin. Do they have that??? I could bring it with me if they don’t think it is an explosive devise. Aunt Kathy gets busted for bringing 2 seemingly odd containers on a plane. OOOPs it is just pumpkin.
When I was in Berlin about 15 years ago, visiting Melissa and Joel, I was interested to see that “ein Stuck” of cake, as offered by various bakeries, was enough to serve the three of us — and we like cake! Are the pieces that enormous in Tubingen also?
Like Kathy, I wondered about pie charts, too. And what about “pieces of eight”? No pirates? Argh!