So, the days of my first 8-week intensive German class are wrapping up. Hard to believe that it has been two months already! I can’t say that I make perfect sentences, pronounce words as they are intended, or have the vocabulary to articulate all my thoughts, but I have definitely improved since the day we landed in Deutschland. As long as I am talking to a German-learner at the same level as me…the conversation can go on all night…and it has!

Needless to say, by this time my classmates are pretty comfortable with each other and are used to using a lot of different methods to make their ideas known to all. It all must be in German, because our teacher doesn’t want to hear anything but German and has a “No Mother Languages” rule. Our favorite words: warum? (why?), ich weiß es nicht! (I don’t know it), and genau (exactly).

One day last week, we are sitting around during a break and I come to learn that several of my classmates have huge crushes on our teacher. They are explaining (in beginner German) how they could not focus for the first several days because they were smitten, how they are tired of constantly hearing about our teacher’s wife, how they stay up late at night talking about him, etc. etc. Basically, every elementary-level German verb and vocabulary word was used to describe their feelings about our teacher. It was hilarious!!

Several of us ladies planned a dinner to commemorate our accomplishments thus far. Adhering to the “No Mother Languages” rule was not going to be a problem because the Valencian spoke only German and Spanish, one Italian spoke only German and Italian, the other Italian spoke Italian, English, and German, and then there was me. We were lucky to get a table at the restaurant and there is a weird little bed in the corner near us. Warum? Ich weiß es nicht!

I’m sure that listening to our conversations is thoroughly entertaining. I know that people laugh at us…I have seen them. I see them laugh at us on the street, on the train, in restaurants. Oh well! We were all on a train together a few days prior and the Valencian was trying to tell me, “My heart beats only for you”. (“Warum” you ask? “Ich weiß es nicht”. People say weird things when they speak at a kindergarten level.) She got as far as the “you” part and then struggled. “Dir? Dich? Du?” The old lady next to us was laughing…out loud! I then proceeded to have a 5 minute conversation with her; starting with “Wir lernen Deutsch” (We’re learning German). She talked and talked and then asked where we were all from. Great! A question we knew!! We were best friends before she left.

Back to the restaurant. What is funny is that our conversations include the words “comma”, “neben satz (secondary sentence), and “bling! dativ” (a trick our teacher uses to get us to remember to use the dativ form) so that everyone else can understand what is intended. There are also hand motions that indicate to the listeners to be patient because the remainder of a verb or the past tense of a verb is still to come. The conversation eventually turned to our teacher. How sad the girls would be not to see him “jeden Tag” (every day). The strange bed next to our table had integrated itself into every topic of discussion, so of course it was used to help the Italian communicate her feelings for our teacher. Ahhh…the dreaded location prepositions. Was she in the bed, on the bed, over the bed, under the bed, or at the bed, with our teacher? Ich weiß es nicht!

So I ask the waitress (I am the only one is class willing to ask total strangers for grammar corrections, if you have not deduced that already): “auf dem Bett”? Her response: “Genau”. Ahhh…hearing that word is like having the dentist say you are cavity-free. Sweet relief! On the bed. You are never “in” the bed in German, unless you are made of wood or got sucked into the mattress-machine. What was really funny is that during our meal we had to put our salad plates on the bed because there was no room on the table. The waitress came by and asked if she could take the plates auf dem Bett (on the bed)! Sure you can! We all had a good laugh about that…including the waitress.

Hopefully my next class will have characters just as dynamic as these. Regardless, it has been a trip!

Who doesn’t like a good wine tasting? Freiburg is not northern California, but wine is wine right? The event was put together by our language school, who boasted that all the wines would be local to the area. There were 12 people total, including us. The levels of German proficiency were quite diverse: four beginners, at least two native speakers, and the rest were somewhere in between.

We all sat at one very long table, Joe and I at the end. The “Wine Doctor” came in and started pouring the wines and giving his presentation….alles auf Deutsch. Joe and I sat and listened and picked out words we knew or had heard before. I grabbed a “pineapple” in there somewhere, although I am not quite sure what the pineapple was supposed to be doing because I didn’t taste any in the wine.

No one said a word. No one tasted the wines. We just sat there, feeling awkward. Finally, a German-native asked if we could go ahead and taste. A sigh of relief. Three samples of white wine came and went and the chatter started to get a little louder. Out came three red-wines. As the amount of wine consumption increased, so did the conversation amongst the group, and the fluidity of speaking German.

A little bit of alcohol-induced social courage goes a long way. Thus is the theme of the rest of the evening.

I have almost finished my three red wines when I notice that the Italian sitting across from Joe has not made a dent in any of her glasses. I want to say to her: You don’t like red wine?  I think to myself, Ok, you know all these words; you know how to put the sentence together, so just ask her. I decide to try it out on Joe first, “Du magst nicht rotwein?”. He changes my nicht (negative used only with verbs) to kein (negative used only with nouns). Then I correct myself – a yes/no question has to start with the verb. Final version of the sentence: Magst du kein rotwein? I try it over several times with Joe and then finally ask her. She understands!!

She doesn’t like red wine, its too strong, and offers me her glass. I politely decline. “Nein, danke.”

So then we get to talking. Where do you live, why are you learning German, etc. Another Italian girl says that she wants to speak in English, but can only think of the words in German. I tell her that I want to speak in German, but can only think of the words in Spanish. Things are looking ok….this is a quasi-conversation….auf Deutsch!

Then Joe starts to talk. He leans in and begins to say (auf Deutsch), “My teacher says 95%……” He is interrupted from across the entire table. “Fünf und neunzig Prozent!” An intermediate speaker over hears this tid-bit and wants to know what bold statement is going to be made next. The entire table goes silent and Joe is left to make his point…auf Deutsch.

Although this is not the first time Joe has captivated a crowd, it is the first time his newly acquired German has been put on the spot. He continues. “My teacher says 95% of women don’t like beards.” How prolific. He pets the ear-to-ear growth he has been working on for a few weeks, now that he is sans a daily flight-suit. The ladies at the table begin an uproar. Some agree whole-heartedly. Others protest defiantly, “Nein, nein, nein!” So, what does Joe do? Classic move here. He goes around the table and takes a survey of which ladies like the beard and which do not…auf Deutsch!

Ironically, I am the last lady to be surveyed. They laugh that I have to like it because I am the “Frau”. I don’t even answer because I am still stuck on how we went from red wine to beards.

Next step: Dinner. We find a new place in town that we have not tried and successfully order our meal and drinks…auf Deutsch. If we butchered any words, the waitress was nice enough not to say anything. What we thought we wanted showed up at the table, so it couldn’t have been that bad. Paying for meals in Germany is interesting. You have to ask for the bill and then be ready to pay immediately. They don’t leave it on the table for you to calculate and stew over, or divide up with friends, and no one uses credit cards. So have your cash in hand!

Small tips are given as well, but only a tourist leaves money on the table. When the waiter arrives with the bill and his/her change purse, you have to decide what you want the tip to be and then ask for change from the total amount. For example, if your bill is €38,40 and you have a €50 note, you need to ask the waiter for change from €40. If you are a scrooge, there is no hiding it in German restaurants. If you don’t know your numbers…auf Deutsch…there is no hiding that either. Not a problem tonight!

Final step: Cocktails. Here is where the characters got a little interesting and the German was flowing. We order successfully and chat with each other, until the gentleman next to us starts asking questions. He goes on and on…auf Deutsch…about how he was all over the US in 1980. He asks us our ages and laughs at the responses. At least Joe was alive when he was there! He buys us two Kölsch beers because it is the best in Germany. Then he recruits another poor sap and engages in a discussion about the best beer in Germany. This guy thinks Rothaus Tannenzäpfle is the best. Here come several bottles of that!

Deep breaths, its just beer Trysta. Thank goodness Joe swapped my mostly-full bottles for his nearly-empty ones because I was struggling. The German was coming pretty easily though. I stood up on my stool and asked the bartender if he had The Captain….auf Deutsch…without even thinking about it. “Haben Sie Captain Morgen?” He laughed and said no and then returned a minute later rattling off about something. Joe thinks he asked me why I didn’t like Whiskey. He could have asked me to get up on the bar and act like The Captain for all I know. What followed was a mess of a Birthday Boy bearing “Geschenke” of more beer, a girl asking us to join someone at another bar, and a shoe-less jaunt in the Bächle.

Eventually, we reached the other side of the bell curve…auf Deutsch. Everyone was talking too fast, the articulation was getting sloppy, and we had tapped out our vocabulary. What was really funny was thinking back to what my teacher had said just that afternoon in class. He encouraged one beer while doing our homework “to loosen up the jaws”, but not three or four or five. He always asks, every Monday morning, what we did over the weekend.

How am I going to explain this…auf Deutsch?

Yes, that is a real German word.

Translation: my favorite free time activities

Too bad I didn’t have any after I was finished translating this word! Actually, my teacher wrote it up on the board this afternoon. That is why I know it is bona fide Deutsch, and not just a figment of my delirious imagination.

Today was my graduation from Day #17 of language training. The ceremony consisted of a solitary bike ride home. I was met with applause of screeching, yelping, a wide K9 smile, and the twinkle of 16 little toe-nails on hard-wood. I was gifted with a new level of utter confusion, neatly gift-wrapped and tagged: “für Trysta, liebe von Deutsch”.

I decided several years ago, in a small mountain-town of Peru, that to be a good traveler meant one could not judge a country by the standards of another. I had to adopt this principal in order to swallow beef heart and guinea pig for dinner. To say that the German language is illogical and border-line ridiculous would be to judge it by standards of the English language. This, I know, goes against the principals I work toward every time I leave my home country.

So, to rectify, I will just say that learning German is a challenge. Let me present my arguments:

1)      ARTICLES – In German, there are three: der (masculine), die (feminine), and das (neutral/neuter). Every single noun in the world had an article. Learning Spanish, it was fairly reasonable. There are only two (el and la)  and most of the nouns end in feminine vowels or masculine vowels to help you out. Not the case in German. One of the text books Joe was reading said to just memorize them all. Great…I’ll get right on those 30,000+ nouns! To top that off, half of the other words in your sentence depend on the gender of the noun. So if you guess wrong….you are really wrong.

2)      PAST TENSE – In order to say anything in the past tense, you actually have to use the present tense of “to have” or “to be” in the beginning of the sentence and then end the sentence with the past-tense verb. Let’s use the following sentence in English as an example: Yesterday, I bought eggs, milk, and cheese in the market. When you put the German sentence together, what you are literally saying is: Yesterday, have I eggs, milk, and cheese in the market bought. (Gestern habe ich Eier, Milch, und Käse in der Markt gekauft.) As my teacher likes to say (in German), “Surprise, its past-tense!” He tries to lighten the mood when we are all frustrated because the listener/reader doesn’t find out until the end of the sentence whether the action is occurring now, or already did!

3)      WORD COMBINATION- The title of this post is a doozy for sure. The combination of German words is usually amusing, but poses many challenges, in accordance with argument four below. If you put a shoe (Schuh) on a hand (Hand)….you obviously get a glove (Handschuh). However, what do you get when you put snow (Schnee) and a broom (Besen) together? No…not a shovel…that would be absurd! You get a whisk (Schneebesen)!! To learn something (lernen) is really important, as is to know something (kennen). To meet someone, however, is to learn know them (kennenlernen)!

Oh gosh, my teacher would be so disappointed. There is not an article in that entire paragraph.

der Schuh, die Hand, der Handschuh, der Schnee, der Besen, die Schneebesen

4)      WORD SEPARATION – Once you think you’ve got a handle on the articles, the word combinations, and waiting on the edge of your seat to determine if the sentence is present or past tense, then comes the icing on the Black Forest Cake. Verbs that separate! Yes, one verb separates and makes a new home at the beginning and end of the sentence. So now, not only do you have to wait until the end of the sentence to get the tense, but you also have to wait to get the rest of the word!! For example, in English: In the mornings, I get up at six thirty. What the German sentence is literally saying in English is: Mornings get I at half seven up. “To get up” is one verb: aufstehen. The German sentence is: Morgens stehe ich um halb sieben auf.

Remember the verb “to meet”? kennenlernen   Lets pretend you want to say, “We are meeting your mother quickly in the morning in Freiburg.” The literal translation of the German sentence is: We learn morning in the early quickly in Freiburg your mother know. German sentence: Wir lernen morgen in der Früh schnell in Freiburg deine Mutter kennen.

German makes perfect sense to all the millions who have learned it before me. The trick is to put aside everything I know about English sentence construction. In the words of mein Lehrer (who actually does say this in English, just to drive the point home), “Stop thinking. Just be a grammar machine and put the sentence together according to German rules!”

Yes, I learn slowly good German Mr. teacher.  Ja, ich lerne langsam gut Deutsch Herr Lehrer.

I will German with the standard of English not judge. Ich will Deutsch mit der Standard von Englisch nicht richten. 

(Sidenote added on Jan 15, 2012: I am looking back at these sentences, with an additional three months of German classes under my belt, and realizing how poorly they are written. I am not going to change them though. I am going to leave them exactly as they are, and enjoy them as a documentation of progress made!)