Advertising can be obnoxious at the best of times. Escpecially when it’s too repetitive (on tv, radio, youtube …) or too in-your-face. One of my pet peeves, however, are grammatical or spelling errors – intentional or unintentional. If you spend money and time on an ad, spend a little more to have it checked properly. This one irked me particularly because it is a for a festival of literature with particular emphasis on young readers. They left out the verb: “reading needs to learned”. If it was meant to attract attention, it got mine – but a very negative one.
What gets me riled up often is the use of English in a German environment – and then getting it wrong. It’s not like English is a rare language and no mothertongue speakers can be found. Leonardo Hotels is a German hotel chain but it is owned by an international group.
Seriously?
And then there is Denglish (the German equivalent of Franglais). Or throwing in an English term in a German sentence, usually to garner acceptance with young people. The example below is minor but still stupid. It’s an add for the Voluntary Social Year in Germany, mainly directed at young adults, financed by the German government. It reads: “SCHOOL /check/ -> soon SAVE THE WORLD”. Besides the unnecessary English it’s also the wrong word: “next” would have been better.
Ragtag Daily Prompt: Obnoxious
pictures imperfect blog 
All my bugbears too. So annoying to have, for instance, tourist info placards summing up the history of some site or other in an English that would only be acceptable in a young person who’d not studied the language for long. These signs seem particularly prevalent in large communities stuffed with Anglophone speakers, many of whom would willingly turn the piece into decent everyday English. For free, probably.
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My worst was a dinosaur exhibition in a park in Kaiserslautern. Admittedly, there weren’t any major mistakes but the English was just not very idiomatic. At the time there were around 100,000 American soldiers living in the area.
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Grrrr.
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