Apparently there was an advertisement in the paper this weekend to sell something, and as luck would have it, they posted the wrong number – our number. The truth is that our German is limited mostly to ordering things at a restaurant and telling people we’re sorry that our German is bad. This makes it more than a little challenging to explain to people over the phone that they have the wrong number due to a printing error. In an effort to come up with a good sentence to use for the dozens of phone calls I’m getting today, I went to Leo and tried to look up the word for advertisement. This is what I found:

Below this there were 49 more phrases and words to help you narrow it down. I found this which got me a little closer to what I wanted to know:

Now from here I had to make an educated guess (well, not that educated). I decided to go with die Zeitungsannonce since I know that Zeitung is newspaper. I really have no idea if it’s the right choice.

Here’s the sentence I came up with (with a little help from Google Translate):

Sind Sie fragen nach der Zeitungsannonce?

Then I hope they keep it simple and just say, “Ja.”

Then I get to say a sentence I feel a little more confident about:

Dies ist die falsche Nummer.

Then I pray that they don’t ask me a lot of questions because even though I will probably understand the questions, I’ll be completely incapable of coming up with a coherent answer.

So, my German speaking friends, here is your chance to help me out. How bad is the question I came up with, and what should I really be saying?