Teachers are forever reminding pupils that “Handy” (mispronounced “hendy”) is
a mobile phone in British English. Maybe we should also be explaining that
this word is used by native speakers only as an adjective.

Mispronunciation, if you’re not careful, can be a matter of life and death, as
Berlitz highlighted in a popular advert. “We’re sinking!” – a ship’s Mayday
call to German coastguards – is tragically misconstrued as the officer
enquires: “Oh ja, and vot are you sinking about?”

Hearing so much English mispronounced is slowly “Germanising” my native tonge
too. I recently phoned the cinema to ask for times of Woody Allen’s To
Rome with Love (“love” is pronounced by young Germans as “luff”, and the
older generation as “low-ver”) Asking about this “Vooty Ellen luff-feelm”
made me feel foolish, but at least we understood each other.

But nothing makes me feel more silly than having to mispronounce my own
surname, Howe, as “Hover”.Otherwise it is invariably misspelt as “Hau”,
“Hovi” or “Howi”. I used to spell it out, all four letters: “Ha-Oh-Vee-Ay.”
Eventually I found it was simpler just to pronounce it correctly, referring
to another oft-used English word in German – “Know-how”.

When the time came to set myself up in business with a language training and
translation service I didn’t need to think too long about what to call it:
Know Howe for English.

Tim blogs on life in Germany at knowhoweforenglish.blogspot.de/

This article was originally published in The
Telegraph Weekly World Edition.

Do you have an expat experience you’d like to share? Email no more than
1,000 words to weeklyt@telegraph.co.uk