- German has some contractions that have become standard and mandatory, mainly “am/an dem”, “im/in dem”, “beim/bei dem”. If you don’t use the contraction you emphasise the article (an dem Tag und nicht an jenem/on this day and not on that one).

Beside that, it is mainly clipping the word “es”, as in “wie geht’s, wie steht’s”. The apostrophe indicates that this is not standard, and it ain’t gonna become standard, probably.

- The Bavarian parting phrase “pfiati” was “pfiati Gott” before, which is believed to mean “behüte Dich Gott” (may god watch over you). This is a shibboleth for Bavarian, by the way.

- To-ward and of-ten is how I hear these words pronounced in England.

- If you learn English as a non-native speaker you would swear that the words “vegetables” and “comfortable” have four syllables. Obviously, something gets elided, here.

- The well-known (here around) skiing ressort Sankt Anton am Arlberg in Austria is abbreviated St. Anton. I you want to indicate that normally you go heli-skiing in Canada and only this year just couldn’t make it for lack of time and instead had to go to Austria, you can call it Stanton.

Regards from Munich

Rainer

So an off-topic forum will probably go in there at some point.

Robert, we don’t conceive of the forum as being (necessarily) the main place where shows are discussed, but rather where other language-related topics get an airing. I doubt that I would be able to keep up with starting a new thread each time there is a show, and I don’t want to prevail on listeners to have to do it each and every week.

Believe me, the “each and every week” thing is a lot more oppressive than you might imagine. It might seem easy to just pop a post up there on the forum, but having to do so no matter what else you are doing or where you might be is not such an easy task to keep up with.

What I would suggest is adding an Off-Topic area after a while. At the moment it won’t be necessary, because the number of users is still low. But if it get’s really crowded (and I’m sure it will) and there is no Off-Topic area where they can post in, people will start posting stuff that just doesn’t fit into the regular forums. I’ve moderated forums before and experienced that a couple of times.