Hi there, Internet traveler.
On the off-chance that anyone stumbles across this blog anymore, a couple things you should know:
1. This was a travel blog about my year abroad learning German, when I spent a summer in Vienna and two semesters at Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany. It ran from July 2010 to July 2011. It’s not active anymore, but I like having it as a memento of that time.
2. Stained glass windows were some of the most startlingly beautiful things I saw during that year. As a result, I now have an even geekier blog, which is actually active.
Alles Gute!
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Independence Day / Jubiläum
One year ago today, I arrived in Vienna. I met Kris at the airport and when he tried to greet me in German, had to tell him that I didn’t understand any of it! My first impressions of the city I would come to love came that night: our dorm’s courtyard and cat, tiramisu at the restaurant, the other program students, the mysteries of speaking to the waitress in German.
Today I went to my Sociological Theories class, one of the courses I’m taking with other German students at the university, which has its big exam next Tuesday. The teacher gave a presentation on Foucault, who we had read for this week, and I found myself being a little less confused than usual, actually really enjoying it, and thinking I’d definitely like to read more Foucault when exams are done.
When I think about how I’ve changed this year, I think about all the little victories that have only been possible because of having difficulty with German. For example:
The first time I read a whole book in German—Momo, by Michael Ende, a lovely story with some truly great characters, which reminded me a lot of Charlotte’s Web.
The first time I actually laughed out loud at something I read. Humor is difficult.
Passing my classes last semester. I wasn’t sure if I would, especially in regards to The Political System of Germany.
Building a “How to Interact in the Kitchen” frame, or “How to Act Natural In German When You’re Cooking When Someone Else is Cooking.” This was complicated. You have to take into account the time of day, the length of each person’s activities, the complexity of each person’s activities, how many other people there are, and your previous interactions with them, just to name a few.
Figuring out how to register for my exams online.
Speaking in class.
Knowing how to write a form letter (or at least thinking I know!).
Being able to understand things overheard in passing.
Only needing my small paperback dictionary to read, instead of the extensive online dictionaries. This means I can read outside much more easily.
Every time I hear a train go by, I think, “the next one’s me.” I’m flying home on July 25, one year and twenty days after I left the US. Between then and now I’m a) taking my last exam and b) going to Paris.
It’s weird to imagine not being in this room anymore. It’s weird to have it be that familiar. I still have to pinch myself every once in a while: I’m in Germany! It feels like much longer that Marburg has been my little world, and at the same time much shorter. The half-timbered houses, the color of the river, the Chinese food shop on the way into town, the movie theater, the steep steps up to the Castle, the bridges, the park and its rosebushes on the way to class, the trees outside my window: they’ve become such a part of my mental background, so vertraut to me, and yet strange, since I suddenly wonder if I’ve gotten the right mental pictures and if I need to take new ones and if I’m going to remember it all like it really was. Which is a silly question, because of course you never do.
I will remember this, this feeling of slowly becoming a tourist again, needing the urgency of leaving to make me think of all the places I haven’t visited yet and want to visit again. And being so grateful to have had the opportunity to make paths for myself here, little routines like going to class or taking a walk in the woods or going into the Oberstadt, repeated experiences that conflate together into one bright, deep memory.
From a recent walk, this was great, I love the way the light just lay across the path:
Brussels in May
Back in May, I went to Brussels for a long weekend to stay with my cousin Sabine and go to the EU Open Day. The three bodies of the EU that are based there, the Commission, Parliament, and Council, all opened their doors to a thousand-strong crowd of people, speaking too many languages to count. All the divisions of each institution had their own tables or booths, all made fun and interactive for the public. Among many others, you could see confiscated contraband cigarettes at one of the Commission’s law enforcement divisions, win a graphic novel depicting characters who the European Social Fund helped to go back to school, or do a maze blindfolded while your partner told you to go right or left in any combination of the 23 official EU languages.
This last one was at the Directorate-General of Translation, a division of the Commission, where Sabine works. Her colleagues all wore nametags identifying which languages they spoke, five or six for most. They are required to speak at least two of the official EU languages, which are English, French, and German: English being the most widely spoken language in the EU, German the most common mother tongue, and French shared by Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg, the three EU political centers. But the more the better.
I loved seeing all three divisions of translation. Each institution has one, and at each one we said hello and asked about internships. All the workers were very friendly, and it was a real pleasure to hear the rapid-fire switch and flow of languages surrounding their tables. They were also happy to help potential applicants. By the end of the day my free blue bag was full of pamphlets about translating for the EU, and I had my first concrete experience of the working benefits of having my German passport—many internships are only open to EU citizens, or easier to get. They would go for five or six months, and sometimes only require a university degree, although the competition is fierce.
Sabine and I at the Parliament interpretation division.
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Fifteen excellent German words for gossip, blather, and chit-chat
Like English, German is a language rich in vocabulary for describing idle talking. I’ve encountered a few of these in the past week or so, probably because we’re reading Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk), and Grass’s vocabulary is so incredibly rich. Even though I still have to look up a lot of words, and read paragraphs repeatedly, I can tell he’s a great stylist, and I look forward to coming back to his books when my own vocabulary is better.
So this category came up and I decided to research it a bit. Just go down the list and read them out loud to yourself and maybe, like I did, imagine that each one is an imaginary animal with its own peculiar inner life.
This also showcases some interesting habits of German, such as adding ei onto the ends of verbs to make them into nouns (like -ness), adding Ge- for emphasis, and a love for the sound tsch. These aren’t all synonyms per se; they just describe similar ways of talking. I think.
die Faselei
das Gebrabbel
das Geplapper
das Geschreibsel
das Geschwätz
das Geschwurbel
das Gesülze
das Getratsch
die Hechelei
die Klatsch
der Kokolores
der Mumplitz
die Quasselei
der Quatsch
der Tratsch
On another note, I will seriously write more about the exciting things I was up to in May and June. I went to Belgium, France, and Italy, not to mention participating in my first Model UN here in Marburg, and doing my first two real life class presentations at the university. Exams are in two weeks, and then everything will be a bit more relaxed until I come home, but before that I’ll try to post at least some things I’ve been meaning to finish.
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Der Wald im Frühling
There are two kinds of woods on the hill above my dorm: almost entirely beech trees on the north faces of the slopes, and almost entirely firs on the south faces. Walking through the beech woods in April was like walking through a cloud of green light, a hailstorm of peridots, the leaves blazing in the late afternoon light like fireflies. They were so thin and soft that I half-expected them to dissolve between my fingers. That was about three weeks ago. By now they’re papery and tough enough to last the summer, and not nearly as translucent.
Photos taken between April 10 and April 20.
Language bears rule!
The following is a recent post on an interesting language blog, Omniglot.
Today I came across this quote from Francis Bacon on YourVietnamese.com:
“Men imagine that their minds have the command of language, but it often happens that language bears rule over their minds.”
At first I interpreted it as meaning that “language bears (i.e. linguistically-gifted bears) rule over their minds”, rather than the more likely meaning that “language bears rule over their minds”. I don’t know if Mr Bacon intended this to be a pun, but that’s what it is to me.
This got me thinking about what kind of creature a language bear might be – perhaps a real bear that have been taught or acquired a spoken or signed human language; or a talking teddy bear of some kind, like the BábógBaby, an Irish-speaking teddy.
The expression ‘to bear rule’ is not a common one, as far as I’m aware, and sounds like something you would find in the Bible. For example, the King James version of Daniel 2:39 is “And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth.”, and Esther 1:22 is “For he sent letters into all the king’s provinces, into every province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house, and that it should be published according to the language of every people.” – the king in question was Ahasuerus, who is identified with Xerxes I (519-465 BC).
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Vertraut
It’s spring in Marburg—there are blooming tulip trees in the Oberstadt and cherry trees on my way to class. Along the river people play soccer like there was never a flood, and when I look across the valley, I can see the neon green of the beech leaves slowly creeping up the hillside along the lines of the stream beds.
(I’m going to do a whole separate post about the beech trees here. You’ll see why.)
ESG Haus has suddenly sprouted whole beds of flowers, moats almost, tulips and daffodils and tiny sweet-smelling white ones in the grass. There are lilacs blooming around the hedges. It’s becoming progressively more difficult to get any work done inside here…
Vertraut, an adjective, is one of those words I picked up in conversation without ever properly finding out what it meant until much later. It’s odd, the associations I get with that kind of learning. In English it means something like “close,” “familiar,” or “intimate.” But were I to directly translate a sentence like Dieser Ort ist mir vertraut, my instinct is still This place is trusted to me, rather than the correct This place is familiar to me. The verb vertrauen means “to trust”, while the noun das Vertrauen means belief, confidence, faith, or trust as well.
This place is trusted to me. Dieser Ort ist mir vertraut. Sometimes thoughts come to me in German now, in ones and twos, usually only a whole sequence of them when I’m talking with other German speakers, but as I looked out my window at the bursts of green over in the Oberstadt, I thought vertraut. I haven’t always. Spring is my favorite season, especially early spring: so light, so much joy. But recently I’ve been feeling something like weight, a slow change in perspective: meine Güte, I’ve been here a long time. It’s not a bad sensation. It’s just odd to see my third season from this window. But I could spend a long time here.
I already have spent a lot of time in front of this window. It’s a nice big window, which takes up most of the fourth wall of my room, and is one of these wonderful European designs that tilt forward or swing open. It faces west. In the winter, the sun set between the Lutherkirche and the Schloss; now it sets behind Elizabethkirche. I remember my first night in Marburg, coming into this room and opening the curtains for the first time, seeing the Oberstadt and the Schloss all lit up across the valley from me.
During the winter, I had some fairly ambivalent feelings about being in this room. It was where I was alone, where it took me an hour to read one page and I still didn’t understand it, and where I sometimes doubted if either circumstance would ever change. Things aren’t like that any more. I read outside on the lawn, surrounded by other sun-lovers. Everyone comes out of their rooms more.
But I have actually never been ambivalent about the view from here, and that seems like something to celebrate, now that we’re safely out of the winter. It’s a fantastic view, and each season has its advantages. This is where I saw the sun come out in November. This is where I watched the snowstorms hide the Oberstadt in December. This is how I got back from Cortijo los Baños and opened the curtains the next morning and saw a cloudless blue sky, almost summer.
September 2010
December 2010
January 2011
February 2011
April 2011
May 2011
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Two notes on three languages
Being at Cortijo los Baños was a beautiful and fascinating experience, in many different ways. One of the things which I thought about more or less continuously was my use of language—the conflicts and confluences of English, Spanish, and German that always surprised me. This ought to be the first of many posts on this subject.
1. Spanglish vs. Denglisch
Spanglish in Cortijo los Baños is a lot less prevalent than Denglisch in Marburg. People do occasionally use English words, like saying “Hello” instead of “Hola,” or a funny expression, “For you and your body,” which everyone seemed to use as a kind of comical toast. But those are few and far between, and mostly used for humor, like an otherwise monolingual American kid saying “Ciao” or “Merci” just to be different.
In everyday conversations, English isn’t really as much of a feature. In Germany, people sometimes bemoan the fact that in business or economics you really have to know English to understand what’s being said in German, by Germans, for other Germans. Words like marketing, as the Guardian noted, often replace their German counterparts. Among students here, OK and cool are a regular part of German conversations (even when words like cool are correctly conjugated as a German adjective—das cooles Auto, die coole Musik.)
Not so in the Cortijo. One of my first linguistic challenges was picking up on all those helpful little filler words which move the conversation along—like OK, right, and cool in English, they affirm the other speaker’s ideas and indicate that one has understood. Vale, venga, guay, chulo, and many more appeared out of the speech around me. Most of them were dialect. Since only someone who’s conversationally very comfortable can use them correctly, identifying the uncountable contexts belonging to each one, this wasn’t something I’d picked up in language classes. There, the teacher was the only one with such a high level, and it didn’t come out in conversation.
The few other foreigners generally spoke a fair amount of English—not to me, and not to each other. But when we had our occasional non-Spanish-speaking guests, it was often Bernhard, the Austrian, or Elisavetta, the Italian, who showed them around. I later found out that some of the other people in the Cortijo did speak some English, enough for a basic conversation. But for most of them, it had been learned in school and hardly used since. There just wasn’t such a need, many people explained to me. Like in many parts of the US, there you can go your whole life without needing to speak more than one language. You do all your business with other Spanish speakers.
American culture is still present in the movies and music, but the movies are all dubbed and you don’t need to understand all the lyrics to like the songs. I remember one time talking to Mon about Queen, who she liked a lot, and had learned about when she spent a month in England in high school. We went over the songs we both knew, and I tried to explain the phrases like bite the dust and paid my dues and for real. But I had to tell her that even though I know the individual words, I don’t know what “Bohemian Rhapsody” is about or actually means.
That was when we found out that “Another One Bites The Dust” and “We Will Rock You” are really good songs to beat rugs to. But back to language conundrums…
2. English vs. Not-English
I actually spoke a lot more English in Spain, on a day-to-day basis, than I ever did in Germany. (A lot is relative, though: in Marburg it would only be with the other BCA students who didn’t speak so much German, maybe once every two or three weeks when we met up at Kris’s house.) In Cortijo los Baños, like in Marburg, I met a lot of people who wanted to practice their English. There were a lot of reasons why I eventually decided to do it, which I thought over for a long time beforehand.
For one, I had this idea that my Spanish was better than my German. I’m not actually sure that’s true anymore, which is kind of scary, considering the time I’ve spent studying one compared to the other. I can probably still read and write better in Spanish, but I think that my speaking skills are pretty much even now, which is to say, conversationally limited when confronted with specialized vocabulary or fast talking, but basically functional. But I thought that I was less likely to get worse at Spanish as a result of speaking English.
The second reason was a conscious decision to reverse a rule I’d held to in Marburg. Kris impressed upon us from the beginning that language habits in acquaintances formed really fast: you have to make it clear that you want to practice German, even if you speak it badly and the other person speaks English very well, otherwise you’re never going to learn. I stuck by that, for the most part, and it worked for me. I was afraid that if I established an English-speaking relationship with someone, it would be harder for us to switch into German, because the other person would probably already be very comfortable in English. But in the Cortijo, I knew that English wasn’t going to become a substitute for communicating in Spanish, simply because most people didn’t know as much English. We could talk about word oddities, and have some conversations, but in the end everyone spoke Spanish together. There wasn’t really any other option, and I was glad of it.
The last reason was something I didn’t realize for a few weeks. When I first got to know people at the Cortijo, it seemed like everyone had a shareable skill of some sort—cooking, quasi-professional massage, meditation techniques, dance, profound knowledge of the native plants and their cycles, guitar playing, and many more. I didn’t know what I could offer this wonderful group of people, and gradually English came to be something I could share, if somebody wanted to practice. When I looked at my motives for not wanting to speak English, it seemed withholding somehow, or miserly. I wanted to be able to contribute something. It was a way of becoming part of the communal give-and-take, which made me feel vastly more comfortable there.
Sometimes it was just vocabulary words related to whatever we were doing. Sometimes it was a walk set aside for English Practice Conversations with Mon, who had learned English in high school, and wanted to pick it up again. Sometimes it was talking about English and American rock music with Alex, who spoke very good English already, and didn’t want to forget it before his dream trip to Australia. Sometimes it was just singing Simon and Garfunkel while bottlefeeding the piglets, and finding out that someone walking by knew the chorus to “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.”
This definitely worked at Cortijo los Baños, and I don’t regret the amount of English I spoke there, but I think I’ll stick to speaking German here in Marburg. It’s just a very different situation.
It’s my last day here, unbelievably enough. Here’s Gracias a la vida, by Mercedes Sosa. This is the song we always sing at the end of the Thursday meetings.
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