Dem Tweet könnte ich verstehen!

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

June 9, 2014

Today I saw a retweet from one of my German friends. At first glance, I spotted bits and pieces I could immediately parse.

“Weg” is way. “immer” is always. “Schüler” is school goer, i.e. student. So I slowed down and walked through it.

“Der einzige Weg” – the one something way. Hmm…must be “the one and only way”

“ein wirklicher Meister” – I remember Entwickler being a software developer. This sounded similar, so I loosely dubbed it “a working master”.

“zu werden” – Well, “werden” is for future tense, so I figured it meant “to be”.

“ist” – is

“immer ein Schüler zu bleiben” – always a student to remain

String it together and I gathered: “The only way to be a master is to always remain a student.” That sounded proverbial, so I was highly confident I was right.

I cross checked the expression on Google Translate and got “The only way to become a real master is to remain always a pupil.” Sounds pretty dead on to me. In my excitement, I could not help but respond: 

Naturally, Eberhard responds:

Well…it might be awhile I can find THAT amount of spare time. I suppose I’ll have to settle for chatting mit meine Deutsch Mitarbeiter am SpringOne im September. Tschüss!

1 Comment

  1. Eberhard Wolff

    Super – freut mich, dass Du Fortschritte machst! 🙂

    Reply

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