Now that I am home a lot of people have asked me the following question: "So, you must be fluent now, right?" After thinking for a second how best to explain what I've managed to learn within a year and what I still need to work on, I simply respond, "Yeah, sort of." The truth is that I'm not sure I could ever be fluent in German. There are far too many grammatical rules and even more exceptions. Not only that, but the idioms and expressions I learn are quite impossible to translate. I think back to Nina and Robert speaking Deutschlisch, which means speaking English but directly translating everything from the German, hopefully exaggerating the German accents to atrocious levels. Their conversations resulted in such phrases as "Oh, I break together" and "I would like to become a beer please" and "press your thumbs that we have good weather tomorrow," none of which make much sense to a non-German speaker. These are funny pieces of the German-American conversation that I can now partake in. It makes perfect sense to me to use the verb "bekommen" to mean 'to receive' instead of 'to become'. Incidentally according to Jan that is the distinguishing factor of all German tourists in the US - they will consistently ask their waiters if they can become more bread or that if only they could become a schnitzel, they would be content.
German continues to frustrate me. I read a wonderful book that I had started in Berlin called Selam, Berlin by Yadé Kara. The book was written in German by a turkish woman, and was therefore much easier to understand than any academic texts I had read during the year. The sentences were short, to the point, umgangssprachlich - meaning slang - and often quite amusing. And yet there were still verbs that I had never encountered before. Kara used about ten different verbs to describe one of the character's yelling. When I think about it, we have all sorts of verbs to describe that in English - shouting, screaming, proclaiming angrily, raising one's voice - and that is one place I need to work on. Getting used to the more traditional German - the paragraph-long sentences, the roundabout way of describing something, the lack of antecedents, the verbs all the way at the end of the sentence/paragraph so that you have no idea what the action is all about - that will continue to mystify me till the end of my days.
By the end of the year I made strides in my conversational German. My listening and reading comprehension really was pretty good, but my writing struggled. You don't really know something (like a language, for instance) cold until you can write it all out. The fact is that if I didn't have the wonderful Jasna, one of the tutors for BCGS, helping me correct my papers, I probably would have sounded to my professors like a sixth-grader without a spell-checker. I felt so confident speaking with Anna, my roommate or with Diego, who complemented me on my German a few times. Robert knows exactly what I mean when I struggle to remember a word here and there, and Nancy and I tend to just switch to English when we're talking politics or getting in to something more complicated. When I would step into my German class, level B 2,2, despite my general confidence speaking, I would be reminded of how much I still needed to learn. Memorizing genitive forms of verbs, remembering that the plural forms of nouns does not always follow a pattern...
But I plan on staying as disciplined as possible (notice that I'm not guaranteeing anything) because I am in no way sick of German. It has become part of me, part of the way that I structure my sentences in English, really. I could hardly speak French when I went to Montreal because German prepositions kept coming out. I find myself occasionally forgetting the English word for something and needing to translate it from the German to express something while catching up with EB or Janna (of course they both understand these language confusions). I brought two of the best grammar books back with me - trust me, I've gone through MANY and they are the best - and I fully intend to take a day, or two days, or many days, and practice on my own. Keep building up my vocabulary, keep practicing my prepositions, keep sending emails to Germany not just to practice but of course to stay in touch, and maybe I'll even have a bit of time at the U of C to take an advanced German course this year. Too bad that I don't have time to make German a second major, but theoretically I could pass myself off as "being fluent" once I graduate with or without adding German to my Arts degree.
Some of my funniest memories from this past year involve my tendency to repeatedly misuse German verbs. I have many examples, and will try to elucidate some of the confusion.
Once after visiting a little (very) old town in central Germany I had promised to send pictures to Robert's Dad of our day trip. I was going to forward all the pictures to Anna's father, since he grew up in that same little town. The town was called "Weida". I mixed up the name, and put as the subject to both emails: "Weide!" Anna was very confused, and asked me the next day what "Weide" I was talking about. Apparently that can either mean a field, or be the adjective wide. I explained that I had been there and she exclaimed Oh! WeidA! Now I understand. Alas, I was a bit embarrassed that I sent Robert's Dad that email - after spending a whole day there you'd think I'd get the name right.
"Wir können alle zusammen knutschen" - This is something I said to Robert's Mom. The conversation was about what I will do once I move my mattress out of my apartment. Will there be anywhere for me to sleep? I answered, of course. My roommates have a lot of space, so I can join Anna in her bed and we can make out together. After seeing her stunned reaction Robert said, you mean kuscheln, not knutschen! I wanted to say sarcastically that Anna and I could cuddle together, not make out in her bed!
"Ich wünsche dir viele schöne Rutsche!" - There is an expression that people say at New Years, essentially meaning 'hope you have a good transition into the New Year'. But the verb they use to describe this transition is "slide", so it's more like sliding into the following year. But I took this literally. This came up after an almost christmas-time dinner at Judith's apartment. Just before leaving I said to David, Judith's boyfriend, that I wished him many happy slides in the New Year. As in I hoped he would get new slides, like the playground kind, to play with in 2009. He didn't tell me right then and there that I had mixed up the entire expression. Instead he told me a good few months later that the entire family had laughed about it as soon as I left their apartment. I don't think I will ever live that one down. But at least now I understand the whole slide reference. Just so you don't mix it up, the right way to say it is Ich wünsche dir einen guten Rutsch ins Neuen Jahr.
"Ich möchte gern mich von meinem Haar scheiden lassen" - I was getting a haircut, or at least planning on it. When I relayed these plans to my roommate, what I actually said was that I wanted to divorce myself from my hair. She thought for a moment, and asked, "Wait, you really want to get rid of all of it?" I had never had that intention, and said I just wanted to cut a little bit. That time I used the right word, and then she realized that I was confusing the verbs to cut one's hair - Haar schneiden lassen - which technically translates to let one's hair get cut - and to get a divorce - sich scheiden lassen. Whoops! I guess it is kind of funny that the way I used it still sort of made sense...
"Zahnbruste" - This was an awkward one. I was in the kitchen with Anna's older sister Melanie. Something happened to the tiny little sink in our bathroom, which rendered it unusable, so we all needed to crowd around the kitchen sink to brush our teeth. I asked Melanie if she could pass me my tooth breast. Yes, I am not kidding. I mixed up the word for breast - Brust - with brush - Burste. She looked at me as if I had two heads before realizing that I had just said it wrong, and then we laughed so hard that we couldn't concentrate on brushing our teeth.
Those are the examples I can think of right now. Perhaps more will come up, even some that I never even realized I was saying wrong. From these incidents I conclude that it would be a simple shame if I were so fluent as not to mix up any words anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment