False Cognates

If you've ever learned a new language, false cognates -- words that sound similar in two languages but mean different things -- can be tricky. I still sometimes get tripped up by stay / stehen (stand) and map / die Mappe (pencil case), and I remember how one of the first year English students at the Austrian school in 2008 answered the question, "Where did you go?" with "me." (Wer is German for who).

Another false cognate, one that I experienced richly last night, is foosball / Fußball. Fußball in German is just regular soccer; what we know as foosball is Tischfußball (table-soccer). At the Goethe-Institut party last night, about 50 teachers, staff, and students met in basement bar for beer, multilingual conversation, and, of course, Tischfußball. (Yes, the Institut has a bar. This is Germany, after all.)

I've never been very good at foosball, but I spent quite a few nights in high school playing the game in a friend's basement, so I thought I had some grasp of it. But Tischfußball, even though it uses the same apparatus, has more in common with Fußball itself than with the American arcade game. While my preferred "strategy" has always been to fire off a big spin of the lever when the ball gets in my vicinity, the Germans I was playing with and against employed lateral passes, sent the ball back to the goalie for a clearing kick, and paid close attention to field position. I'd never seen anything like it before. Instead of leisurely holding the handles while sipping my beer, I found myself bent over the table, in intense concentration, trying to match my opponent's centering passes with my own tackles and blocks. After embarrassing myself a few times, I was even able to pull out a win against Kathi, another Central College Abroad student, and Umut, a Turkish student in my class. (Okay, so my partner was a native German and the best player of the night. I scored one of our goals!)