What household cleaners do we use?
We looked at which household cleaners we used:
detergent | Frosch | Mr Proper | ||
liquid soap | liquid cleanser | Spree | ||
toilet brush | Pril | washing-up liquid | ||
washing powder | Toilet Duck | Tipp | ||
Gut und Günstig | Fairy | Ecover |
I suspect that the company in the book EcoClean is based on the name Ecover.
the sound that g makes in English
The general rule is:
- G + A, O or U is pronounced as a hard G as in the German word Logik
- G + E or I is pronounced as a soft G like the family name Pietsch
Remember as we are talking about English there are exceptions like the word “get” which has the hard G probably because it is related to the German verb gessen
Referencing with this and that
We had a question where one of the options was “due to that fact” and that particular answer would not fit into the sentence because of the way that that (and of course this) work in referencing things. Here are two similar sentences:
- I like ice-cream and believe it is good manners to clear my plate completely because of that fact I ate it all.
- I like ice-cream and believe it is good manners to clear my plate completely because of this I ate it all.
The difference is that the first sentence focuses our attention on the “like ice-cream” part and the second focuses our attention on the “clearing my plate completely”.
Product names used for objects in everyday speech
In English (especially British English) it is common for the names of a particular companies product to become the generic name for objects:
- biro – the name of the inventor of the ballpoint pen has become the name of the ballpoint pen.
- hoover – the company who dominated the vacuum cleaner business in the first half of the twentieth century has become the noun to describe a vacuum cleaner and the verb to describe vacuum cleaning.
- sellotape or scotch tape both are brands of adhesive tape – have become the synonyms for sticky tape.
These are called generic trademarks and there are many others too.
There are examples of this phenomenon in German too:
- Tempo for a hand tissue
- Litfaßsäule for a type of free-standing cylindrical advertising column invented by Ernst Litfaß
- Schrebergarten – the name for an allotment in Germany.
practising selling things to each other
We practised using the language of selling to each other in the class and we looked at how effective we were at it. This is covered in a separate posting here.