Over the last 2.5 years I have learned enough basic German to feel comfortable going into stores and business and speaking an elementary level of the language. I can make appointments, return electronic goods, pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy, etc. But despite all of those triumphs, there is still one area that I stumble over every single time I’m confronted with it: correctly conforming to the language of forms.

This is a frustrating problem that comes up often enough, since, as people say here, whatever you want/need to do, there’s a form for it you have to fill out.

Case in point. I went to the dentist today for a regular check-up. Since it was an office I hadn’t been to before, I had to fill out an intake form. No matter the type of form, be it in a doctor’s office or at the post office, the forms tend to include questions with words that aren’t part of my basic German vocabulary. But that’s not the my problem with the form, as that problem is easily solved; I just have to have my dictionary at the ready to look up any unfamiliar word.

No, my problem is more fundamental than that, even though it is something that shouldn’t be too hard. You see, the forms invariably start with the following as the first thing to fill in on the form:

Name:__________________________

Since that German word looks like the English word “name”, I always immediately write-in my first name there without thinking about it. So here’s what the form looked like after I’d filled in the first blank this morning using my first name:

Name:________Linda______________

Reading on down the form, I arrived at the second blank to fill in:

Vorname: __________________________

Argh! Yup, I’d made the same mistake yet again.  Vorname in German means “first name”, while Name in German on a form really means they want you “family name” on that line. Which means I should have put “Linda” on the Vorname blank, not on the Name blank.

Such a simple thing, but I can never remember that when I first see Name on the form. I’m so conditioned from North American to filling in your first name first on forms, that even though I know it’s the other way ’round here, I still always make that same silly mistake. Why is that so hard to remember? I mean, I have adjusted to writing the European order of the elements when writing a date: i.e. day-month-year, rather than the American month-day-year.  I have no problem when writing a street address here either, even though the house number goes after the street name instead of before it as in North American addresses (i.e., it would be “Main Street 32”, not “32 Main Street” for an address here in Germany).

And I even usually remember to put the postal code (=zip code) before the city name when addressing an envelope to a place in Germany instead of after it.

But that Name blank on those darn forms gets me every time. Sigh.

Oh well, at least my German classes prepared me well for chatting in German. So when the friendly dentist told me in a German that I had no cavities, I was at least able to understand that.

Which is good on many levels. After all, who knows — perhaps if I’d needed a filling, there would have been another form to fill out for that.  😉