Language: Sorry no Pictures (Day 45)

Well,

My time in Berlin is coming to close and before I head down to Austria for the next term I figured I'd share a few things I've encountered in picking up "German". Perhaps some of the information may even prove useful.

The first is that, startlingly, I haven't really been learning German so far, I'm learning "European." As a buy product of the fact that most of the people I interact with are other language students, many of whom already have several languages under their belt, when you don't know the German word for something you can generally just use the Latin based equivalent and the message will get across. Or for that matter, you could just talk in English, because frankly everyone already knows how to speak it proficiently (however, this is the foreign language equivalent of the dark side of the force). This last thing tends to lead to a mind-numbing feeling of "why did I even bother learning a foreign language in the first place?" every once and a while, but the trick is to lie down, let that pass over you, and then do something competent in a foreign language. You should be able to ride that high for a while.

The second is that, as far as I can tell, there are a few discrete steps to gaining language fluency.

Stage 0: Can't understand a darn thing. Generally happens to me when I hear my classmates talking in Korean.

Stage 1: Nouns and Context. Ok so you've gotten yourself a few words under your belt and can begin to understand what people are talking about when they point at an elevator and say "Fahrstuhl" [lit. far chair] this is good. This is in fact so good that it can be enormously intoxicating. There are however a couple of weaknesses inherint to this stage. One is that people tend to pay no attention to verb tense whatsoever, instead just picking out key words, i.e. I know that the man said the number thirteen and the verb to pay, so I can be reasonably confident he wants me to pay 13 euro for something. The issue is that when using a language in this way, one generally discounts entirely the words he can't uderstand so it is likely that he's only getting half the message, like the part where the man actually said "you have thirteen seconds to run otherwise you'll pay." Secondly, this sort of communication is enormously based on context. Or to put it another way, I know what you are doing, even if I can only understand a few nouns because I'm accustomed to these sort of interactions, i.e. this is the part of the day when you ask me if I want fries with that and I say, "Nein danke." However, once anything moves out of that context, the games over and your back to looking like a confused tourist.

Stage 2: Paying attention to tense. Ok, so you've got the nouns down and can recognize basic vierbs. Good. Now you need to start distinguishing between the subjunctive, the past, and the future because timing is important (especially here!). To do this you can't just pick out nouns from a sentence and arrange them. You need pay attention to the whole sentence as it comes so as to distinguish what is happening. However, once you have made it to this stage you should have a wide enough vocabulary that basic interactions don't pose a problem.

Stage 3: Dropping literal translation. Its hard, but there comes a moment when everyone realizes that direct translation between languages are practically impossible (except of course on a noun to noun level). This is especially evident when looking at particular noun/verb pairs, the use of prepositions, and the ever inpenetrable forest of ideomatic expressions (expressions like "thats a whole different kettle of fish" are deadly for noun searchers). However, only after one makes the jump away from literal translation is it possible to begin consersing with other people with any degree of speed. Words in "insert foreign tongue here" must not just bring to mind words in English, they need to lead directly both to images and sets of other words in that foreign language (just watch out for depending to heavily on overly habituated responses).

Stage 4: Playfulness (total mastery). It is at this point when poetry starts to make sense because you are able to break the rules of grammar and idiom in ways that make sense and can help convey a particular idea. It is here where, armed with the full tools of a language one can begin to express thoughts not adequately expressed through a traditional lexicon. It is here where one can use a tool to to adequately indicate one's thought. I have no idea how I'm going to get here.

This is of course difficult to do because our internal monologues are so firmly rooted within the the language we grew up with......