Learning the Language
Jesse and I are by no means fluent in German yet so I'm sure I'll have more stories to tell in the future as we learn. His company generously provides each of us 100 hours with a private tutor and an online program to help with our German. We started with our hours before leaving in hopes of having a base vocabulary before arriving. Jesse actually started with Rosetta Stone a year before just to learn it for fun and somewhat manifesting of this dream. He actually was asked to interview in German to which he politely explained he would only be able to tell them what he had for breakfast… haha!
I want to share a few funny experiences we have had with the language thus far.
Spanish vs. Latin
It has been so interesting to watch Jesse and I learn side by side.
He is definitely more advanced than I am however neither of us took German as a foreign language in High
School. I took 4 years of Spanish and he took 2 years of Latin. Spanish has a similar format to conjugate verbs and the nouns have male and female articles. German actually has three (male, female, and neutral) and unlike Spanish you just have to
blatantly memorize them. I had a slight advantage over Jesse in grammar because I had experience with verb conjugation in Spanish, it was a completely new concept to him. However, his Latin background (and incredible ability to memorize) meant that his advantage was in vocabulary. He struggled with the verb conjugations but could name almost every item in our house due to him knowing Latin roots. We are only slightly competitive as a couple…ha! The competitiveness however, has allowed us to balance the others strengths and practice with each other as well.
The Same, But Different
This is less of a story and more of an alphabet lesson. While the letters all look the same (outside of letters with an umlaut: ä, ë, ö, ü), many of them sound different in German than they do in English. Here are a few of the most contrasting letters that I found interesting.
Bakery Overload (almost)
Jesse is bolder than I am when it comes to speaking. He will talk to someone and have his grammar be all over the board yet still be able to get his point across. Where I tend to not speak until I have thought the entire sentence through and double checked my verbs, nouns, and sentence structure. I'm sure some people have questioned my sanity as I sit there with smoke coming out of my ears in the moment.
Jesse and I stopped at a Bäckerei (Bakery) one day and while he was ordering our coffees with one barista, I ordered our food with another. I wanted a Berliner (large jelly filled donut covered in sugar - highly recommend) and when I ordered it, the barista pointed out that I would get a discount if I ordered 6. It took me a few seconds to realize what she had said, though her mask, then a few more seconds to translate it and form my response back to her. In that time, Jesse happened to overhear and panicked thinking that I was accidentally ordering 6 massive donuts and jumped in to reiterate "just one please!". We went on to have a lovely conversation with the baristas who didn’t speak English at all. They realized that we were still learning so they spoke slowly and clearly to us. It is still one of our favorite interactions to date.
Grammar Order
My most recent lesson with my tutor, Udo, was particularly funny to me. We were going through the lesson about verb placement and sentence structure and my task was to tell Udo what was wrong with each of the three example sentences. How my brain works, and I assume many peoples brains when learning a new language, is that you first directly translate each word then look at the whole sentence to figure out the meaning. Here was my first example (translated):
Here you today not can swim.
Now, I understood the meaning of the sentence to be "You cannot swim here today" and I was correct. However in German, the two verbs (can and swim) cannot be next to each other and are considered out of order. "Can" needs to be in the second position in the sentence. So it should read:
Here can you today not swim.
My instructor sighed and said "See, now the sentence makes so much more sense!" I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at his statement. I explained the direct translations, he paused for a second then chuckled and agreed with me. I'm very hopeful to one day be fluent enough to not have to think so hard about where the verbs go in the sentence!
As with anything new, there will be ups and downs, triumphs and frustrations. I hope these few stories added a smile to your face today! Tschüss!
Progress is progress no matter how small the steps. :)
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