This is Tennessee, not a lot of people speak German

[SailorMan]

aka human trafficking

(tho be careful of those pimps, sometimes they're yakuza. one of the guys where i worked was rough on the girl and ... her handlers were japanese mafia and they showed him what rough *really* is)

This was in Korea, around '96 or so. I'm pretty sure the Yakuza confine themselves to Japan. I didn't personally see any of these ladies myself, but my recollection was hearing that besides they themselves being Russian, there were always Russian men close by, connected to them in some way. That was the concern of the German-speaking couple in my tale, that I was one of the Russians that were in Korea at that time, who (at least then) were notorious for shady dealings while in that country. Koreans that I dealt with, such as at restaurants or department stores, seemed wary of me, too, unless it came up in some way that I was an American.

I'm not a teatotaler by any means -- I just don't seem to crave alcoholic beverages very often at all. In fact, I can't remember the last time I was in an actual bar. I guess maybe that's one of the things that makes me a nerd. So, I can't report here any first-hand info about the setup there. But that's not true of about 93% of my shipmates, though. I remember that two crewmembers on my ship at that time got into an ugly fistfight in the bar in question. The reason for the fight: "No! Natasha loves me! Not you!

I guess that human trafficking could've been involved. My only knowledge of the subject comes from one episode of Law and Order, SVU and maybe a couple of articles in news magazines.

[Gawdzillers]

We have a lot of German students at my school right now, and they all speak very good English. Some of them don't even have a heavy accent, other than the "r"s sounding like "w"s, but that's to be expected.

[BookstoreEscapee]

My first name is actually a word in German, but it's not pronounced the same way. Whenever I meet someone who does speak German and they see my name before hearing it, they ask if it's pronounced the German way (first time I encountered that was one of my professors in college). I had a customer in Store1 who spoke German and he always said it that way, even though I had told him how to pronounce it. He was cool, though. He taught me how to say "I am not [mynameinGerman]"...can't remember anymore, though.

[Reyneth]

After the factory is built, will the owners have enough left over to buy ze Cleveland Browns?

Are you sure anyone would *want* them? It's downright embarrassing to have them as my hometown team and I'm not even really a Browns fan!

[Naaman]

If I were moving to another country for a while, I would start studying the language. At least if you study basic conversation and cover things you use regularly, you should be able to get around fairly well while you pick up the language from use.

Whilst I agree wholeheartedly having a store where a few people speak German to a reasonable degree will increase traffic to the store when the new residents hit town

Will also be handy for the family members who turn up, there's less incentive for them to learn English as quick as the workers

[Digitalpotato]

Some woman out in the university got frustrated because everyone over in Quebec spoke french and no one out in Colorado (Which is what, thousands of miles away?) spoke French.

Turns out she actually WAS giving a lecture in a Frenc hclass