'Super' Schweinsteiger helps Javi Martinez settle at Bayern
Bayern Munich's new Spain star Javi Martinez has said he is being made to feel at home in Bavaria thanks to the efforts in speaking Spanish of his German midfield partner Bastian Schweinsteiger.
Bayern Munich's new Spain star Javi Martinez has said he is being made to feel at home in Bavaria thanks to the efforts in speaking Spanish of his German midfield partner Bastian Schweinsteiger.
"Bastian is a super guy, he helps me a lot and even speaks a bit of Spanish with me," Martinez told German daily Bild, having cost Bayern 40 million euros (US$50.85m), a new Bundesliga record, from Athletic Bilbao last week.
"He explains the exercises we do in training, which I don't yet understand in German.
"We understand each other really well in the training games and he's helping to make it fun here.
"He's not the only one, the others are all making it very easy for me to feel at home."
Schweinsteiger insists his knowledge of languages comes mainly from his experiences in the Champions League and, as a consequence, is not always refined.
"I am proficient in swear words in Spanish, French, Dutch and Italian," the Germany star joked to SID, an AFP subsidiary.
With neither Schweinsteiger nor Martinez having been called up for international duty with Germany and Spain respectively this weekend, the pair have remained in Munich with Bayern's skeleton squad for training.
Bayern coach Jupp Heynckes has said it is crucial to integrate Martinez into the squad as quickly as possible and the club's new defensive midfield pairing look set to face Mainz in the next Bundesliga home match on September 15.
"I am training as well as I can to get a regular place," said Martinez in an interview with Bayern television fcb.tv, while Heynckes has described Schweinsteiger and Martinez as a 'dream pair' and they look set to start.
The Spaniard made a brief debut from the bench in Bayern's 6-1 Bundesliga drubbing of Stuttgart last Sunday and Brazilian midfielder Luiz Gustavo could be relegated to a regular place on the bench.
Martinez has already started picking up a few words of the Bavarian dialect with the southern greeting "Servus" never far from his lips, but he declined to comment whether Schweinsteiger had yet taught him a few German swear words.