Wir Lernen Deutsch!

For Christmas 2010 I bought Julie a ‘German Word of the Day’ calendar, admittedly not one of my finest gifts.  The next week I returned it because it is impossible to keep up with ‘one a day calendars’.  Plus we were not really expecting to move to Germany, so why bother? 

Today’s blog is about our progression in learning German.  It is tough to keep track of how we much we have learned so I figure it would be good to make a written note about our German knowledge in a before/after fashion.

It wasn’t until about May 2011 that the idea of learning German was rekindled, although still not very seriously.  The first word I can remember learning was ‘mitarbeiter’ (meaning co-worker) which we would go around pronouncing ‘meter beater’ when the correct way is ‘mitt arr-biter’.  Not only was the pronunciation wrong but we had no idea that this word was constructed from two other words meaning ‘with’ ‘worker’ (more on this additive process later). 

At my brother’s wedding the next month we were telling our family about our prospects of moving to Germany.  Naturally, people would ask us about our German skills and I will never forget how we could not even count to 20.  Oh yeah, but we still want to move there anyway!  We do, right?!?

In other words, we were absolutely clueless about the world we would be entering in 6 months and about correct tactics to learning a language.  Furthermore, I don’t think we realized how hard it would be to learn a language.  To elaborate, it is not difficult to learn new German words.  The vocabulary is pure engineering and often very intuitive.  One of our favorite examples is the word ‘oberlippenbart’ which is the sum of three words upper+lip+beard or in other words is a moustache!  So the words themselves come fairly easy most of the time.  The only problem is the words get very long because of this additive process (e.g., Kreisverwaltungsreferat = city hall). 

The real difficulty in learning German, even for natives, is the grammar rules.  Now I know English has its difficulties in grammar but there is absolutely no contest in comparison to German.  For instance, like many other languages, German employs the use of gender for nouns, but in addition to masculine and feminine they also have a neutral and a special case for plural.  Of course, the adjectives and articles must also follow the proper gender.  But to complicate everything even further, the declension for each M, F, N, and P has one of four different endings each depending on the situational usage.  In other words that is 4 x 4 or 16 different ways in which articles, adjectives, and nouns can be used grammatically.  Lost?  Don’t worry. We felt that way and often still do!  Take a look at this oversimplified grammatical chart illustrating the 6 different words for ‘the’.

I’m not complaining though, at least not in this instance. If anything I think it is a real testament to how brilliant the human mind is- how we can learn anything.  Given enough repetition, the most complex language rules become automatic.  I do get a little upset though when I notice a 5 year old grasping German grammar better than I do.  The difficult part about the grammar is that it kills your confidence to use the language.  When you don’t know the grammatically correct way to say something it is easier just to stay silent- which we often do.

For the six months leading up to our move we spent endless hours with Rosetta Stone, library audio tapes, and German dubbed episodes of Gilmore Girls.  We only had the weekends and evenings after work to learn as much as we could.  By the time we arrived we felt pretty comfortable in hotels, restaurants, and shopping etc.  We were kind of in that ignorance stage where you feel like you know everything and we figured we would be fluent in just a few more months.  When your vocabulary is about 100 words deep, learning 10 more new ones feels like a vast improvement.

It didn’t take long though before we fell on our faces (sorry Jules, no pun intended).  I remember once asking to buy a passport instead of a train ticket and Julie saying good morning to someone around 5 p.m.  One of my favorites is when Julie got yelled out for ordering a half-chicken (feminine – “halbe”) instead of a half-chicken (neutral – “halbes”).  Another favorite is when I wanted to say “we are ready to check out of our hotel” but instead I said “we are lost”. 

Things got even more difficult as the real world encroached in on us.  By the time work started I was sitting in training sessions in German!  I sure hope they were not important.  And although it feels very isolating, I am glad that I get to experience so much German communication at work because Julie does not have the same experience.  It gives me the extra motivation and practice to continue improving.

Our skills have progressed significantly since we have been here, albeit slowly.  We have managed to squeeze into and out of some tricky situations with our German knowledge (hospital, locksmith, beer festival, driver's license).  It is pretty remarkable how much we have taught ourselves in just one year’s time.  Technically speaking we are around a 4-5 on a 10 point fluency scale (defined here as A2+ to B1- range).  One day we hope to become fully fluent, and more importantly we hope to always remember what we have already learned.  It is kind of scary to think about all of the Spanish we have forgotten - we can’t let that happen with our German!!

And our dogs have taken up German lessons too!  Thanks to our dog walker they now know the German word for sit/down.  They’re not too keen on the grammar rules though.