Learning the Language

I know one thing about you: you have an interest in things that are German. Clever of me, eh? Why else would you be reading this blog? You want to learn about the country, its people, its culture, and its influence on your own country. What I don’t know---what I can’t take for granted---is whether you also want to learn its language (if you don’t already know it). I can’t take your interest for granted because many people want to know something about the language, but don’t particularly want to learn how to understand and to speak it.

Some of you were raised in German-speaking homes or neighborhoods, but even that doesn’t mean that you know the language. You might understand it when you hear it, and even be able to speak it well enough to get by. But you can’t read it very well, let alone write it, and you don’t know beans about its grammar (for good reason, you’ve been told!).

Then there are those of you who don’t know the language at all, even though you love Germany. You would love to visit, but you hesitate because you don’t know the language. Or maybe you have been there and found that, while it might have been nice to know the language, it really wasn’t necessary, especially not with a good phrasebook or pocket dictionary.

Excuse me, but that’s like thinking that wading in the baby pool is as satisfying as swimming in the big pool. You can get wet, maybe even cool off a little, but you’ll never know the joy of immersing yourself in the water, to feel its flow, its life, and its buoyancy.

So do I think it is important to learn the language? What do you think? Das stimmt! Definitely, yes! Even if you never actually visit the country, or know a native, I don’t believe that you can ever really understand a country's people, culture, even history unless you know at least the basics of its language

Please don’t misunderstand me: I didn’t have such a noble philosophy or motivation when I started “dabbling” in German. In fact, I wasn’t really interested in learning any language, let alone German, which I had always heard was very difficult.

It could have easily been any number of languages which caught my interest, but I had met someone through an Internet mailing list who just happened to be German. I didn’t even have to learn German, because his English was excellent. But I felt bad that the burden of communicating in another language fell exclusively on him. And I was embarrassed that the only foreign language I had ever tried to learn was high school French, and that badly, and because I was required to.

And it wasn’t long before I became fascinated with the language all on its own merit. After a year and a half of trying to teach myself German with every tool I could find, I was finally able to visit Germany, and I fell in love with it and its people. But I think I had already developed a “crush” just from becoming acquainted with its language.

I had never thought about it before, but I found that one can learn an awful lot about a people by the language they speak. Not only do people shape their language, but their language shapes them by helping to develop their thinking patterns and reinforcing their society’s rules and conventions.

It fascinates me, for instance, that Germans have formal and informal forms of “you”, with rigid rules that govern their usage (and that these are becoming more flexible with the newer generations). Americans have no such distinction, which may make us seem more open, or democratic, but which also makes it possible for us to forget concepts like respect and not taking relationships for granted. I also thought it interesting that while Germans use “Sie” for those they don’t know well, and for authority figures, and “du” for our most intimate relationships, or for children, they use the “du” form when they refer to God. What does that mean? What does that say about them as a people?

When I learned how Germans count, I was struck by the kind of thinking that has to develop to be able to grasp the relative size of a number until you’ve heard the whole thing. “How many eggs do you want to buy? Three? Oh, excuse me, thirteen? Oh, okay! Ninety-three!” (German counting goes like this: “drei” (three), “dreizehn” (thirteen---”zehn” means ten) and ”dreiundneunzig” means ninety-three ---”neun” means nine.) When I complained about how hard it was to “hear” their numbers, my German friend remarked, “But we don’t think about it; it comes naturally. It’s just something that we pick up, along with everything else, just like you did when you learned English.” I know he’s right, but I still maintain that German brains have to be “trained” a little differently than ours.

Has it been hard to learn German? Of course! But not at all impossible. I would never have been able to do it, though, if I had held on to my usual perfectionist standards.

When I took my first trip to Germany, I only had a year of self-instruction under my belt, and I felt totally incapable of understanding, let alone speaking the language. I walked around mute, reluctant to fall back on speaking English, but terrified of trying to speak German. And the “words” that everyone was supposedly speaking might as well have been unheard by my “deaf” ears.

But when I resumed my studying when I got home, I experienced a kind of break-through. It was as if the application of the spoken word on my deaf ears had restored part of my hearing. Unexpectedly, the tapes I listened to in the car began to make sense. I recognized a lot more words, and they definitely didn’t sound as weird as they had before. My vocabulary increased rapidly. Grammar, however, might as well have been a black hole.

When I returned to Germany seven months later, I found that I could actually understand some conversations by recognizing key words and guessing the rest from by body language and tone. And I broke my personal sound barrier, and tried to carry on conversations of my own. Of course, I was an abysmal failure, at least to my ears, but I still felt that I was making progress.
Which was why I was surprised when I tried to pick up my studies back home: I just kept going around in circles. Oh, I was able to pick up some more words, and I made some progress with the past tense, but other than that, I seemed to be going nowhere.

This explains how I came to be sitting in a classroom, for two hours a week, for eight weeks. After two years of trying to learn German on my own, I finally decided to “go legit”, and signed up for Conversational German II through a continuing education program.
(TO BE CONTINUED)