On the flight to Austria, I kept hearing my classmates talking about "Veen," a word that had failed to make its way into my limited German vocabulary. This despite the fact I had squeaked through a couple semesters of German. The embarrassing reality was that I hadn't bothered to find out much about the country where I would be studying the next six months--not even how the natives pronounced the name of its capital city.
The whole of my preparation--two college semesters of German--was pathetic for a couple of reasons: I hardly ever attended class and I never once visited the campus language lab to work on my accent, which sounded like something uttered by the love child of Dolly Parton and Konrad Adenauer. The barely passing mark I eked out first semester was a gift from the fraulein who taught the class. Second semester I attended more often, but quickly fell into my high school habits: study enough to appear knowledgeable and perform decently on the tests, never bother to really understand much of anything, and above all, empty the brain at the end of each test to make room for whatever came next.
A large part of my limited motivation was the convoluted nature of German itself. Even Mark Twain wrestled with the language and described the German sentence as something like a long walk through a dark wood with a verb at the end.* But, no matter, I would have been equally noncommittal about learning French or Spanish or Hindi.
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A large part of my limited motivation was the convoluted nature of German itself. Even Mark Twain wrestled with the language and described the German sentence as something like a long walk through a dark wood with a verb at the end.* But, no matter, I would have been equally noncommittal about learning French or Spanish or Hindi.
I signed up for German to make my mother happy. I'm pretty sure she was hoping I would help to translate the intermittent letters she received from a distant cousin in the Black Forest. My mom's grandparents were both born in the old country and, according to her, they and her parents spoke German when they didn't want the kids to understand what was being discussed. This gave me the impression that knowing a foreign language was like belonging to a club, where only members knew the secret handshake.
This impression was reinforced the summer of my senior year in high school. I worked as a farm hand for the wealthy bachelor son of a German family that attended our church. Hank, the bachelor, was nice enough, but basically saw me as a draught horse--available for any dull and nasty job that needed doing. His mother had a similar opinion of the help and would on occasion stop by the ranch and recruit me to dig in her flower garden or carry items into the house. One such time while I was doing her bidding, Hank rode up in his pick-up and asked what was going on. I had been pulled away from painting an endless white picket fence that surrounded the property, something he wanted done quickly so I could be reassigned to other chores. Hank and his mother began to argue in German, hurling what sounded to me like half-choked threats at each other, glancing now and then in my direction as if I were a potted plant and the disagreement concerned whether I should be placed in the sun or shade.
I listened in total incomprehension. Then it happened. In a pique of exasperation, Hank (who had heard German as a child and so could speak enough to be able to argue with his mother) raised his voice to say, "Er ist mein mann." Even his slobbering weimaraner, Waldo, a dog whose brain was the size of a split pea, could have translated that. I recall thinking at that moment, gee, maybe it was possible, for me personally, to understand a foreign language. The idea of knowing one didn't seem so far-fetched. But, that realization was not accompanied by anything resembling resolve to actually buckle down and study the language of my great grandparents.
Which was a shame, because, in truth, I found the sound of German interesting. For example, it had a lilting gravity when put to music. Mom often played our piano and sang along to "Du, du, liegst mir im herzen." My brother and I knew the song and loved the guttural lyric, "machst mir viel schmertzen." For us schmertzen came to mean something like, "This whack in the head is gonna schmertz." The "Ja, ja, ja, ja" of the chorus sounded like a drinking tune, although I knew from my mom that the song was about love. To this day, when I hear the German word for love--liebe--I picture buxom frauleins with steins of beer in each hand, approaching for a hug.
And so, I arrived in Austria armed with a few pronouns, nouns and verbs that I re-assembled randomly for communication purposes, which I rarely did because people had the rude habit of responding in a language I couldn't understand. When I did attempt a German phrase or two, it was often just a mash of mispronounced words, always with the wrong article or tense or declension. In fact, as soon as I spoke, the conversation was likely to come to an abrupt halt, assuming I hadn't accidentally said something insulting or obscene. Because I knew so little, what I was doomed to discover is that a little learning is a terrible thing.
This was apparent within a day or two of our settling into the seedy but regal hotel in the Alps outside of Vienna that housed our foreign campus. On the second or third day after arriving, I went for a walk in the village with my bunkmates and a couple of girls in the group. One of my roommates, Chuck, spoke German fairly well. He informed me that Austrians greeted each other with the phrase, Grusse Gott, which roughly translates as "God's greetings." So the first rosy-cheeked weenie-dog-walking lady I passed, I nodded and blurted out, "Gross goat." The look on her face, something between a disapproving smile and a scowl, withered me. I felt stupid and--before I had time to rationalize my mistake away--offensive.
Thankfully, by the end of the day I had picked up useful phrases for ordering a beer, asking the location of the toilet, and wishing folks a fond farewell. I also learned that a big smile and elaborate hand gestures could communicate well enough to satisfy basic needs--ordering food, asking directions, begging pardon, pleading ignorance.
The number of those useful phrases would increase over the coming months, although I never spoke more than a few words unless lubricated by several litres of the Pabst Blue Ribbon of Austria--Gooser beer--at which time I was still likely to offend whatever German-speaking citizen I chanced to engage in conversation. And as a result, I was not able to benefit from communicating at length with people who stubbornly persisted in speaking their own language and not mine. I did benefit, however, from stumbling around in European culture for half a year--through exposure to art and music and architecture; and through friendly (and on occasion not-so-friendly) dealings with shopkeepers and waiters and public employees.
And so, I arrived in Austria armed with a few pronouns, nouns and verbs that I re-assembled randomly for communication purposes, which I rarely did because people had the rude habit of responding in a language I couldn't understand. When I did attempt a German phrase or two, it was often just a mash of mispronounced words, always with the wrong article or tense or declension. In fact, as soon as I spoke, the conversation was likely to come to an abrupt halt, assuming I hadn't accidentally said something insulting or obscene. Because I knew so little, what I was doomed to discover is that a little learning is a terrible thing.
This was apparent within a day or two of our settling into the seedy but regal hotel in the Alps outside of Vienna that housed our foreign campus. On the second or third day after arriving, I went for a walk in the village with my bunkmates and a couple of girls in the group. One of my roommates, Chuck, spoke German fairly well. He informed me that Austrians greeted each other with the phrase, Grusse Gott, which roughly translates as "God's greetings." So the first rosy-cheeked weenie-dog-walking lady I passed, I nodded and blurted out, "Gross goat." The look on her face, something between a disapproving smile and a scowl, withered me. I felt stupid and--before I had time to rationalize my mistake away--offensive.
Thankfully, by the end of the day I had picked up useful phrases for ordering a beer, asking the location of the toilet, and wishing folks a fond farewell. I also learned that a big smile and elaborate hand gestures could communicate well enough to satisfy basic needs--ordering food, asking directions, begging pardon, pleading ignorance.
The number of those useful phrases would increase over the coming months, although I never spoke more than a few words unless lubricated by several litres of the Pabst Blue Ribbon of Austria--Gooser beer--at which time I was still likely to offend whatever German-speaking citizen I chanced to engage in conversation. And as a result, I was not able to benefit from communicating at length with people who stubbornly persisted in speaking their own language and not mine. I did benefit, however, from stumbling around in European culture for half a year--through exposure to art and music and architecture; and through friendly (and on occasion not-so-friendly) dealings with shopkeepers and waiters and public employees.
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*"An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished." From Appendix D, A Tramp Abroad (1880) by Mark Twain.
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