Hour of Babble II

When I tell people here that I´m taking a language class for two weeks, the response is invariably incredulous (with more inexplicable laughter, see "Berline Daze" above). To an extent, I get it: there´s no way any person, however facile they may be with languages generally, can learn German in a couple weeks. Of course, it´s not as though I expect that by tomorrow evening I should be able to read Nietzsche in the original. These two weeks are just part of an ongoing process that has already taken in a CD-ROM class and a textbook and will next year likely include some sort of formal instruction. Maybe in a couple of years, as time permits, I´ll have a decent grasp of this language. At this point, as long as I can make myself understood when I want some food or the way to the bathroom or not to be conscripted into the German Air Force, then everything´s cool.

But how goes this quest for minimum communication ability? Well, pretty good. By way of background, I came to German with the understanding that of the big languages that use the Roman alphabet, it was probably the most challenging (I´ve no opinion if languages like Hungarian or Polish are harder, but I suspect they may be, but they´re certainly not biggies). And after a couple weeks of class, I´ve made some strides. Conceptually, when I started learning this language, it just seemed so foreign. That is to say, Spanish seemed basically familiar because I grew up in LA and Spanish is everywhere there, and by the time I took a year of French, I had already studied Latin and Spanish, so there were cognates and related gender and grammatical parallels all over the place (or, en Francais, place), so that seemed pretty close to home as well.

German, not so much. There´s just no basis of comparison with the exception of the English cognates (of which there are, to be fair, more than a few), so the learning curve has been unusually steep for me. That said, I´ve just gotten to the point where German doesn´t quite seem as foreign as it used to. When I was first walking around the city, hearing everyone chatter in Deutsch, it made me feel weirdly impressed. Here I was, trying to develop this difficult and strange skill that everyone else around me--five year old children, rubes from Bavaria, bums begging on the subway--had already mastered to the point of unselfconscious fluency.

So at the very least, I can say this: Germans, you no longer impress me (in this respect, at least), for your language is just another. I think this means that I have crossed some early horizon of comprehension and that now that I have a sliver of toenail in the door, the room doesn´t seem like quite such a mysterious and forbidding place.

That said, I still have lots of difficulty expressing anything more than the most basic ideas. Ordering food in a restauraunt usually goes smoothly, though usually something--possibly the crappiness of my skillz, or more likely the lack of confidence with which I deploy them--gives me away and often people just start talking back to me in English. I was also able to get through all of the conversation about my plug adapter with little difficulty (though much of the conversation included gesturing and the use of visual aids), which was a minor triumph. On the other hand, I am still flummoxed when trying to express myself, as for some reason the thoughts in my head just don´t fit well with the tiny vocab I possess. This is particularly tricky as I´m enough of a perfectionist that I don´t like the idea of sounding like a moron and often revert to English if I´m not totally confident that I can say the right thing in German.

Bottom line: it´s a start. Ask me about the situation in two years, and I´ll probably be able to answer you in German.