Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Quiet time is not a custom, it is written down
The German Ruhezeit is the clearest example of a rule that a newcomer mistakes for fussiness and that is in fact enforceable. The usual shape, set by municipal by-laws and repeated in most house rules: quiet from ten at night until six or seven in the morning, often an additional hour or two after lunch, and all day on Sundays and public holidays. Within those hours, noise audible in a neighbor's flat is not permitted — drilling, hammering, loud music, a washing machine in some buildings. Sunday is the one that catches people, because it is not a quiet morning but a quiet day. What is allowed at other times is generous by comparison: renovation on a weekday afternoon is simply normal, and a neighbor has to tolerate a reasonable amount of it. Children are a special category — case law is consistent that ordinary noise from children is to be tolerated and cannot be treated as a disturbance, which surprises people on both sides of the argument. The social order of operations matters as much as the rule. Knock on the door first, because a German neighbor will expect to have been asked before anything escalates, and arriving with the Verwaltung first makes you the problem. Going in a pair is a real tactic and not just Alex being shy: it makes the conversation a shared concern rather than a personal grievance, which is exactly what Zu zweit klingt es weniger nach Beschwerde means. Two customs worth knowing while you are on the stairs. Greet people in the stairwell and the lift — silence reads as hostility, not privacy, as lesson 61 said of the office. And in many buildings there is a cleaning rota for the shared parts, der Putzplan or Treppenhausreinigung, and quietly missing your week is noticed faster than a drill on Sunday. If the noise genuinely does not stop, the ladder continues: the Verwaltung, then a written complaint, then in principle a rent reduction — a Mietminderung — which is precisely the point at which the Mieterverein from lesson 67 becomes worth its subscription.