Hour of Babel

On Tuesday I began my language class. This had been for some time a source of some concern to me, as the good people at the Tandem Sprachschule told me that since I was only enrolling for two weeks, I´d have to join a class in progress, and if it was too far advanced for me, then tough titties, amigo (loose translation--my German is still very rudimentary). I had prepared for this by reading a book about German and by taking a CD-ROM based course, but as the former turned out to be targeted at customers for whom the "for dummies" series is too advanced, and the latter focused inexplicably on learning the names of various kinds of livestock, my confidence in being able to follow the class was not high.

As things turned out, this concern was misplaced. The class is, if anything, covering material that I already understand, though listening to the teacher speak in German for several hours and occasionally being forced to speak myself is truly invaluable. And the composition of the class is a really interesting international mix--there are folks from Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Pakistan, Israel, Slovakia, Japan, and the sweet sweet Vereinigten Staaten (USA! USA!).

This is not to say, however, that I have anything approaching proficiency in German. On the contrary, on the first day in particular, the various languages I had studied seemed to get mixed up as I tended to substitute any foreign word for the one sought in German, apparently on the theory that it´s more impressive to make a mistake in a foreign language than in one´s native tongue. Though this was usually just mystifying to everyone ("Ich vengo des Etats-Unis, alsjeblieft."), it had the unexpected and fortunate effect of impressing the instructor altogether by accident. Asked how I like Berlin ("Wie gefällt dir Berlin?"), I responded with the obvious rejoinder that I do like it, then added, inanely, "sí" just to give some Latin flava. But upon hearing me utter the non-sentence "Es gefällt mir sí," the (non-Spanish speaking) instructor heard "Es gefällt mir sehr" ("I like it a lot.") , and took the opportunity to introduce to the class the new grammatical wrinkle that I had unwittingly introduced.

The lesson, broad readership, is that the local phrase "klar oder kaos" ("clear or chaos?") presents a false opposition. One man´s chaos is another man´s clarity. And with that deep philosophical insight, I bid ye good night.