“That's how all start. From a misunderstanding. When you say 'guest' I think you meaning I can stay in your house. A week later, I move out from Chinese landlord.” An Englishman’s politeness (by unwittingly saying “be my guest”) triggers off a fraught love affair with a wide-eyed young Chinese girl in Xiaolu Guo’s novel, “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers”. The scene is set for a relationship characterised by misunderstandings and miscommunication.

If anyone can relate to the linguistic challenge of dating someone of another mother tongue, it’s surely us, the Erasmus generation. Yet, though we may be getting better and better at mastering other languages, some things just don’t translate.

The damage can be serious – as I know only too well. When a French love interest said to me, “You ‘ave small eyes”, I was so taken aback, I almost muttered something about his big nose in retaliation. Turns out he wasn’t commenting on my sub-standard features, since “avoir petits yeux” is simply an expression meaning “to look tired”. By the time I’d figured that out, it was too late. My Irish friend Eddie, besotted by his new Colombian chica, recently told her over the phone how much he was looking forward to hugging her. Unfortunately for him, his Spanish wasn’t quite up to scratch: what he actually said was, “I can’t wait to impregnate you”. It was a while before he managed to convince her that he wasn’t just desperate for a kid.

Sometimes, the language barrier rears its ugly head before you’ve even had the chance to become properly acquainted. A Dutch friend, approaching a handsome English fellow in a bar, casually asked him for a cigarette. Not knowing the English for “roll-up”, she used the Dutch word instead. Of course, he nearly fell off his chair when she said, “Can I have a shag from you?”

Keeping it simple

There seem to be a few phrases designed specifically to catch out naïve lovers – and French surely wins the prize for the language causing most shame and humiliation. How are we foreigners supposed to know that there’s a difference between “un baiser” (the innocent noun) and to “baiser” (the anything-but-innocent verb)? And then there are all those unexpected innuendoes that catch you unawares: never again will I dare to mention my (female) pussy-cat in public.

Of course, the language barrier isn’t all painful – it can make things more interesting too. A sexy accent and a hint of the exotic can turn a Dull John into an infinitely More Interesting Gianni. And with all those new words to be learned, you’ll never run out of things to talk about. In some ways, too, not sharing the same native language means you’re necessarily restricted to keeping things simple: no over-analysing or having “the talk” about where the relationship is going. (I wonder, is that why men in particular are so interested in foreign girls?) On the other hand, if it takes over a minute just to formulate the sentence in your head, there is a certain limitation as to how spontaneous your relationship will ever be. Jokes are pretty hopeless; and as for arguing, forget it – once you are able to scream at someone in another language at the same time as throwing plates at them, well, by then you’re fluent anyway.

Indeed, as we all know by now, men and women – inhabitants of different planets, never mind countries – speak a different language anyway. With the odds stacked against them, then, isn’t it rather a miracle that heterosexual, cross-national couples ever make it to the bitter end?

Berlin is the spiritual home of the commitment-shy. The tongue-in-cheek expression Lebensabschnittsgefährte just about sums it up. This wonderfully unwieldy description for your significant other – meaning ‘fellow companion for a part of your life’ – is Berlin in a nutshell. Forget romance: this is a city for 21st century relationships – brazenly uncommitted, ever-changing and caught up in a fever of living in the moment.

by Anna Patton

With its famously liberal attitude to sex – the proud hometown of fetish parties, swingers’ clubs, a Gay Museum and an ‘Erotic Museum’ – Berlin doesn’t exactly conform to the image of Prussian puritanism. And so Berliners replace, recycle and update their ‘fellow companions’ at the blink of an eye, much as the city itself falls in and out of love with the latest fashions. No wonder so many residents could identify with the quirky ‘Museum of Broken Relationships’, a Croatian travelling exhibition, when it toured to Berlin – with great success – in 2007.

This whole mindset of living very much in the present doesn’t just apply to relationships. It seems to be engrained in the way people live and work. The lengthy years devoted to studying – the average age of graduating in Germany is 28 – and the high unemployment rate in Berlin makes ‘settling down’ a distant prospect for most twenty-somethings. And even if you are ready to put your roots down here, there is little tradition of buying homes in Germany – worlds away from Londoners’ obsession with ‘getting on the property ladder’. You’re much more likely to rent for many years before even thinking about a mortgage. Choosing to settle in Berlin, then, is only as final as your contract with your landlord dictates. Another opt-out from making those life-changing decisions.

I thought I was being uncharacteristically decisive, however, by when I purchased my own bed on moving to Berlin. It seemed like statement; after all, a 140cm-wide lump of furniture wouldn’t be quite as easy to pick up along with the backpack anytime I got restless. I’d have to stick around for some time. But it seems I wasn’t being so decisive after all. For, as a friend pointed out, these 140cm-wide beds – the halfway-size between single and double – are precisely for people who can’t decide if they want to be single or attached. Seems I’ve already been infected by the Berlin mentality of committing to nothing.