And it also does not mean “I’m a jelly donut”. “Ich bin auch ein berliner” means, surprise, surprise, “I, too, am a Berliner”, which no German had any difficulties understanding.
I think Bill Clinton knew some German. He read a prepared speech in German in Berlin early in his Presidency. The current President Bush knows a few Spanish phrases, but is far from fluent. His brother Jeb does speak Spanish pretty well.
John Kerry speaks French well, from spending his childhood summers there, although, for some reason, he does not aggressively advertise it.
But he didn’t say"Ich bin auch ein berliner", according to my cite below he said"Ich bin ein Berliner" which apparently has a literal meaning-I am a jelly donut.
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/berliner.htm
I did say his audience knew what he meant. Everyone agrees on that.
I apologise for trying to make a little joke, it was obviously a mistake.
The “er” suffix in German is very similar to the “ish” suffix in English, and there happens to be a very good English example as to what the insertion of the “ein” article essentially did - “I am Danish”, as opposed to “I am a Danish”. It would merely be ungrammatical (“I am an English.” - OK, an English WHAT?), if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve taken “Danish” to be a shorthand for “Danish pastry”. Similarly, Germans shortened “Berliner XXXX”, the full name of a type of jelly donut, to simply “Berliner”. I can’t remember what XXXX was.
His German audience fully understood that he didn’t speak German, knew what he meant, and were tolerant of the error. Some of them were probably somewhat amused by it, too.
Unless you are a native speaker, I am not taking your word that “ich bin ein Berliner” was an error. I would be very interested to hear a native speaker answer the question of whether the primary meaning of “ein Berliner” is a person or a confectionery.
It does not have the literal meaning “I am a jelly donut”. If a person says it about himself it simply means “I am a person from Berlin”, i.e. in this case “I am one of you”. The auch has nothing to do with it and those who propagate the idea that he should have said “Ich bin berliner” instead just don’t know German. In case you wonder I have asked a German friend and she couldn’t understand the problem. It’s two grammatically correct ways of saying the same thing.
Well, I heard from two different German teachers (one in high school, the other in college) that JFK’s comments literally *did mean “I am a jelly donut” but given the context of what he was saying (especially because he was speaking a foreign language), every Berliner knew what he meant.
It’s kind of like when George W. Bush went to New York after 9/11… If he had said “I am a big New Yorker!” that day everyone would have thought he meant “I am in solidarity with you folks and feel your pain” and not “I am a extremely large one-topping pizza from Pizza Hut!”
You know?
There are countless web sites available which confirm there was some ambiguity about his remark in German. My first post was a lighthearted attempt to reflect this. That’s why I put a smilie there.
You were the one who wrongly placed “auch” into the sentence, not me. You misquoted me. The word does not appear on any of the sites I’ve looked at, and it appears to be a figment of your imagination .
I’ve also mentioned twice in my posts that the German people understood what JFK meant by his remark, which you have chosen to ignore on both occasions. JFK in fact had his audience “roaring with approval” at his remark, in one report I read.
To prove my point about the ambiguity of his remark, here’s one cite (there are many others)
“Only two years after the wall was built, in 1963, President Kennedy decided to make plain to the Soviets that West Germany was a rampart of freedom America would defend.
He went to Berlin and before 100,000 elated Germans he said so.
He ended the speech with a single short sentence that has remained as memorable as anything he ever said.
If any aggressor ever approached West Germany it would be threatening America. It would learn - as he put it - “I am a Berliner”.
He’d been coached to say this in German by young Robert Lochner, the soldier interpreter.
Kennedy had trouble saying “Ich” and eventually did no better than copy the Bavarian “eesh”. But he proclaimed it with his head high as a clarion call.
I watched this immensely moving scene on television and was, like millions more I imagine, startled by the strange noise that came up from the crowd.
It was an immediate, huge peal of laughter, modulating in about two seconds, into a roaring ocean of applause.
The world “Berliner” is familiar to Germans in a quite different sense from that of meaning a Berlin citizen.
This was evidently unknown to the White House and a very strange lapse on Lochner’s part.
And that sense was the one that first shocked delighted, puzzled, tickled the hundred thousand.
What John F Kennedy had proclaimed with such courage and determination was: “I am a jelly doughnut - Ich bin ein Berliner”!
Hence the four columns and the permanent imprint on the Kennedy record of the name of Robert H. Lochner. “
My post may not have been amusing but there was some ambiguity whether you like it or not
V
to complicate matters further, a jelly doughnut is called a Berliner in all of Germany except Berlin, where’s it’s called a Pfannkuchen
In the rest of Germany, a Pfannkuchen is a pancake – i have no idea what they call pancakes in Berlin…
The native German speakers I’ve asked about this - after they’ve stopped rolling their eyes - have been pretty much in agreement: Kennedy didn’t say anything wrong. In context, he did not want to say, literally, “I am a resident of Berlin”, so the “ein” was perfectly appropriate. But any German speaker present would have recognized the double meaning, yes.
The humor hasn’t been entirely beaten out of this phrase. When driving through the city of Kiel in northern Germany, we passed a small billboard with an ad for a local bakery. It had a photo of the pastry in question and the caption, “Ich bin ein Kieler!” 
I am a native German speaker and I agree: “Ich bin ein Berliner” was no error.
When you tell someone in a conversation that you are from Berlin you might say “Ich bin Berliner”, but in the context Kennedy said the phrase, the “ein” was preferable. It certainly improved the rythmn of the phrase, and that is important in a speech.
That is wrong. The “er” suffix in German is similar to the “er” suffix in English, the “isch” suffix is similar to the “ish” suffix.
I’ve thought some more about it and now I think it’s not entirely wrong. The “er” suffix does sometimes work like the English “ish” suffix when it is used as an adjective. But you can always use words ening in “er” as a noun, and that is how it was used in “Ich bin ein Berliner”.