Hah, yeah, good point. :) My friend's girlfriend is from Leipzig and when she first moved to Austria she was almost reduced to tears after completely failing to communicate to a shopkeeper what she wanted. Everyday words tend to be very different. And then of course there's Swiss German - I once tried watching Swiss TV and failed completely.

Swiss German is for all intents and purposes a different language -- it's nearly as far away from German as Dutch. It has different grammar. This is confusing at times because the Swiss write Hochdeutsch but that's not the language that they use to communicate in. Comparatively Austrian German is rather paletable. :-)