Die Fahrt nach Hause
Heute war mein Ziel so schnell wie möglich nach Hause zu kommen. Ich war erschöpft, doch als ich langsam von der Rost- und Silberlaube zum U-Bahnhof Dahlem-Dorf ging, spürte ich auch Erleichterung. Ich hatte die schwierigsten Aufgaben der Woche erledigt. Mit Hilfe der strahlenden Sonne, ein willkommener Ersatz für das ermüdende, so genannte aprilhafte Wetter der vergangenen Wochen, verbesserte sich meine Laune, als ich auf den X83-Bus wartete.
Er kam an, und ich stieg ein, setzte mich hin und holte Die Vermessung der Welt aus meinem Rucksack heraus. Der Bus war, wie immer, ganz schön voll. Ich schaute die anderen Fahrgäste an und versuchte zu beschließen, ob einer von ihnen alt genug war, oder andere Eigenschaften zeigte, die ein Bedürfnis nach meinem Sitz erkennen ließen. Ob ich meinen Platz anbieten soll, ist für mich immer eine schwierige Frage, denn man kann es übel nehmen. Ich hatte keine Lust, einem überraschten Fremden zu erklären, warum er den Sitz nehmen sollte. Ich beschloss zu schweigen und fing an, mein Buch zu lesen. Der Bus schaukelte ständig, doch für mich blieb die Fahrt ganz angenehm.
Wenn ich mein Buch lese, und zwar hauptsächlich wenn ich unterwegs bin, schreibe ich auf einer Karte, die ich auch als Lesezeichen benutze, alle interessant aussehenden, unbekannten Wörter auf. Die Schrift des Textes auf dieser Karte deutet auf einen linkshändigen Vierjährigen, der mit der rechten Hand geschrieben hat. Das liegt am Schaukeln im Bus. Ich las und schrieb, bis die voher aufgenommene Stimme einer Frau mitteilte, dass wir „S und U Bahnhof Rathaus Steglitz“ erreicht hatten.
Ich stieg in den 282er um und las, langsam und konzentriert, und schrieb, kaum lesbar aber zweckmäßig, weiter. Dann, da ich eine Pause brauchte, schaute ich aus dem Fenster. Ich hörte den Leuten in meiner Umgebung zu. Ich fragte mich ob sie merkten, dass ich ein Ausländer bin. Ein Schüler erklärte seinem Freund, dass dieser andere Typ, den sie beide zu kennen schienen, ihm – was Frauen angeht – keine Konkurrenz machen könne, weil er zu klein sei. „Er ist ja Penny-Stock!“ Ich schrieb Penny-Stock auf meine Karte. Eine Reklame zeigte einen Arzt, unter dem der Text steht, „Er hatte was gegen Wehwehchen.“ Ich schrieb Wehwehchen auf, doch ich konnte die Bedeutung fast ahnen. Ich war immer noch erschöpft, doch ich hatte das Ziel fast erreicht. Ich atmete tief durch und fing wieder an zu lesen.
This is the first text I wrote for my German as a foreign language class. Although I have been practicing as much as possible, I am not able to write in German without making at least some mistakes. Thanks to Sabine Schmidt for editing assistance.
Taekwando
A comfortable routine, familiar surroundings, the local support of friends and family, all these are suddenly missing when one studies abroad. While I look forward to returning to the well known, I am also very aware of the value of having temporarily left it behind. When everything is well planned, it is hard to start something new. Here I had no chance to keep my routine. I touched down in Berlin with very few well defined obligations and spent the first month deciding, from scratch, how I would spend my time. It is with this feeling of freedom that I signed up for a university class in Taekwando.
If any Taekwando masters stumble upon this blog, they will quickly and correctly conclude that I will never join their ranks. The problem isn’t that I don’t like my class in the Korean way of self defense, but that I like it for all the wrong reasons. I like it because it forces me to be physically active for at least one and a half hours a week, because it helps me to meet new people, and because it has taught me a small set of German phrases that I otherwise never would have learned. We meet in the training room of the nicest public high school building that I’ve ever seen. Our trainer, a Berliner from Kreuzberg with Turkish roots, wastes no time. The majority of the meeting involves developing the fitness that one would need in a Taekwando battle. We run laps around the gym and wait for commands. We kick our butts with our heels (”Hacke am Popo!”), stretch (”Dehnen!”), and shove back and forth, with arms locked onto the shoulder of a partner (”Und wir schieben!”). During the first meeting we were told that if the exhaustion is too extreme, then we should say so immediately. In such cases we are allowed to rest, drink water, and eat grape sugar (Traubenzucker).
Near the end of each meeting we have the opportunity to practice our kicks against plush paddles that lucky volunteers hold at greatest possible arm’s length. A short yell is to accompany each kick. As we are mostly beginners, these yells and kicks tend to be rather timid. The reason is that it is very embarrassing to swing the foot high and issue a warrior scream, only to miss the pad and twirl into unbalanced stumbling. Still, a successful student of Taekwando cannot be timid. To help with our development the trainer will normally yell out increasingly aggressive encouragement. “This is your opportunity! Your opportunity to finally put some force into the kicks, and it’s going to waste!” This gets the troops fired up. The feet get faster, the yells louder. A few weeks ago, at the high point of this pad kicking fervor, a student lost balance and hit the floor. Our trainer rushed over to her and demanded that she take a break and drink some water before continuing. Having confirmed that she was OK, the others continued kicking the pads with renewed timidness. The slightly embarrassed student meanwhile sat down on a bench along the wall, drank from her water bottle and ate Traubenzucker.
Tandempartner
When taking German in the United States one is often confronted with the idea that, to really learn the language, you just have to go to the country. Unfortunately this does not translate into guaranteed fluency for everyone who spends lots of time in the Bundesrepublik. Especially in Berlin, it is very easy to surround yourself with Americans and English speaking Germans. I’ve also come to see that, even when I succeed in getting myself into a completely German setting, it doesn’t mean that those around me are super excited about entertaining a frantic flow of pent up questions:
“Hi! Does it really sound strange to speak using Subjunctive I?”
“Hi. Um, I don’t know. Wanna Beer?”
“Sure! When you asked that question, did you think about the Gender of the Word Beer, or does it just happen naturally?”
“Um..I’m gonna go dance now.”
“So that’s how you say that. Does it sound weird to say it like this…”
So I can’t ask the questions at parties, but to walk around and try to speak correctly, without knowing the answers becomes increasingly frustrating. The solution is to find a patient German, who is willing to meet once a week to field questions and correct spoken mistakes for about an hour. These people are abundant in Germany, with the slight catch that you have to pay them back with an hour of English coaching. Last week was my first experience with this program, referred to by the coordinating website as Tandempartner Training.
My Tandempartnerin, a student at TU Berlin, suggested that we meet at a beergarten near Zoologischer Garten. We had already spoken on the phone. Since that had been in German, we automatically continued in that language as we sat down at a table in the sunny, crowded courtyard. It was apparent that I was much more inclined to speak German, than she was to speak English. Still, I didn’t want to take advantage of her reluctance just to improve my German a little longer. After over an hour, I remarked that we really ought to switch. A older man, likely a regular at the beergarten, had been observing us from the other side of the table. He seemed surprisingly aware of the stress that she might be feeling in switching to English and offered a cigarette. Although claiming that she rarely smoked, she gladly accepted. Who would have thought that foreign language could be so stressful?
After five minutes I was able to honestly tell her, that her English wasn’t nearly as bad as she made it out to be. She would sometimes mis-conjugate verbs (He play, We plays), to which I was able to offer a useful rhyme from some English learning for Germans show that I’d seen: “He, She, It? ‘S’ bleibt mit!” (”He, She, It, ’s’ stays with!” So, he/she/it plays, we/they/you/I play.) I came to realize that speaking a little English wasn’t that big of a tragedy after all. Who knows? Maybe understanding the perspective of a German person speaking English can even help my chances of succeeding in the other direction.
Being typisch
Cornell is big, but in the important measure of time needed to get between classes, Die Freie Universität Berlin is much bigger. The University is an exaggeration of the typical phenomenon that German Universities aren’t as centralized as American ones. At the FU, University buildings are freely distributed among Non-University Buildings throughout a roughly defined region of Berlin. Cornell provides passing time between classes. However, a glance at the course index here shows that the two hour lecture blocks are placed evenly on the hours, with no time provided for passing. The problem is solved by the akademische Viertel. The direct translation is academic quarter, but here it refers to a quarter of an hour. Every lecture at FU Berlin starts fifteen minutes after the official time. This is why Goran, a fellow foreign physicist, and I arrived to class fifteen minutes early.
To kill the extra time I got out my flashcards. Every day I make ten flashcards: a picture or simple German definition on one side, the word on the other. My best pictures are of the drill (die Bohrmaschine), the finger nail clippers (der Nagelknipser) and the dishes/harness (same word in German, das Geschirr). I am pretty proud of my flash cards. Goran, a Harvard Student from Macedonia, has thought since he met me that I am a bit obsessive in my language learning pursuits. He was quite amused by my little flash card project and took each card after I’d viewed it for closer inspection, laughing at the obscurity of the words, claiming that he couldn’t identify some of them in English or Macedonian.
Germans began trickling into the room and taking their places for the lecture. Many looked on curiously; a Macedonian and an American expanding German vocabulary is not too standard in the physics classroom. I showed Goran a picture of a saw and he said die Säge, which is correct but more technical and not the term I was looking for. “Goran Nein! Das ist doch ein Fuchsschwanz!” The word literally translates to foxtail. A German behind us seconded, “Ja, das ist ein Fuchsschanz.” And, having that established, we put away the cards and started learning solid state physics.
Was willst du denn eigentlich sagen?
When my guest sister asked me to help with her latest math assignment, I was thrilled. I was exhausted from a week of immersion in a brand new world, and it felt good to be back on my intellectual home turf. Well almost home turf, I was still speaking a foreign language.
At first my explanation was really going great. My excitement and self confidence manifested in notably better German. I was conjugating verbs like never before. The trouble came when the math reduced to a very basic form, which required a very basic vocabulary that I had never learned. The remaining task was to take 18/15 and divide both the top and bottom by 3 for a final form of 6/5. Here is a rough translation of what the conversation must have sounded like:
“OK, Almost done. We just have to…” cancel the threes, but I don’t know how to say cancel. Work around it! “Umm… OK, first we need to break these numbers into smaller pieces, you know like timesing backwards.” How do you say factoring?
“Timesing backwards? Do you mean multiplying backwards, as in dividing?”
“Multiplying! Multiplying! OK, it’s kind of like dividing except we keep both pieces, both slices, both parts and write them as… as a multiplying.”
“Huh?”
“OK, let’s start with this number here above, here.” How do you say numerator? “What is the word for the top thing here?”
“Eighteen!?”
“No, in general, the top part of a…” How do you say fraction? “What is the word for this whole thing together?”
“Math!?”
Well maybe not quite that horribly confused, but it was not the straight path toward the solution that I’m used to. Finally, after I had developed through continued questioning the necessary vocabulary, I was able to provide a coherent explanation. She told me it’s called “kürzen.”
Canceling is “kürzen,” a word which I already knew under another definition: “to make shorter, as in a text, speech, or (mathematical) explanation.”
gurrrrrrrrgeln
The first six weeks of the Berlin Consortium for German Studies Program provide a highly concentrated burst of everything German, designed to blast a hole in the cultural and linguistic barriers separating Schwarz, Rot und Gold from red, white, and blue. An integral part of this transition is the six week language course that offers us BCGS students an extra boost of German Language to decrease our chances of drowning in the turbulent sea of bona fide deutschen Studenten.
The language courses are run by three native speakers who have dedicated a great portion of their careers to the art of teaching German as a foreign language. For sixteen hours a week, these masters help us to eliminate the countless errors that crop up as our American minds and tongues leave the comfortable ease of the word the for the gender and case dependent possibilities of der, die, das, den, dem or des and trade the readily spoken “matchbox” for a nasty five syllable alternative: Streichholzschächtelchen. (The last syllable of “chen” means that the object is small and is not really necessary. The Germans that I’ve met only use it when testing my ability to say the word.)
The courses carry a whole new set of standards. Errors are not to be laughed off but corrected. Awkward but easily understood formulations are to be replaced with a better alternative. The idea that something is good for a foreigner starts to fall away, it has to be just plain good. The expectations leave us occasionally wondering if we can correctly say anything anymore. But this drives us to get better. We meet during lunch to nurse each other’s self confidences back to health. Then we go home, do our homework, and come back the next day with many mistakes eliminated and many more waiting to be made. Most of us know what to say in almost every situation to make ourselves understood, now we are increasing our chances of knowing exactly what to say. Every day the number of perfectly correct sentences goes up and this is the reward that justifies all the effort.
Plus, the classes are sometimes just a wild good time. My favorite single moment would have to be the pronunciation training for the German “r”. The r is a rolling r deep in the throat and can be trained through gargling (gurgeln in German). Imagine a class full of students trying to hold just the right amount of water in their mouths to speak without spewing and then to gargle whenever an r rolls along. Individuals were spontaneously breaking into choking laughter while others honed in on the all desired German accent. Then a lost German student opened our classroom door. He left immediately, running in terror from the now wildly laughing, gargling, German r practicing Americans.
Woher kommst du denn? (Ankunft in Deutschland)
I think it is safe to say that every person has strengths and weaknesses. More recently, I have concluded that my weakest traits happen to be the exact set of traits that one needs to pack a suitcase. I am daunted by the intense organisation, the need to plan basic necessities months in advance. A part of me believes that I need to hold onto my notes, papers, and essays as evidence of my new knowledge, and a defense against forgetting it. Another part laughs at the foolishness of using a mountain of material evidence to demonstrate something purely immaterial, and being buried in the process. These two sides met in epic struggle as I sought to condense all of my possessions into a suitcase and two boxes. But I managed to do it and was ready to go to sleep, to get up early the next morning and take off for Germany. In this moment of relief and triumph, I lost my wallet.
I have since learned that the wallet fell out of my pocket and navigated its way under the car seat during a last minute excursion. Unfortunately, I did not discover this for a couple of days. As it was, I went into serious panic mode around midnight, my sleep deprived mind struggling to grasp the fact that I suddenly had no credit or debit cards, and no drivers license as a second form of ID. My desperate search, which became increasingly irrational and hopeless as the night wore on, was fruitless. I gave up around 2:00AM, two hours before my departure for New York City. At this point I was borderlining on meltdown, I had no money for the bus or the shuttle, and was wondering whether I had stumbled into a reality show where they hide people’s most important possessions hours before they travel overseas. My panic was brought under control, not by a laughing celebrity pointing out a hidden camera, but by my girlfriend, who reassured me that the German Authorities would let me in without a license. Then she gave me enough cash to solve my immediate problems and sent me on way. I dragged my suitcase along the icy streets of College Town and boarded the Greyhound Bus.
From this point on my plans were realised with text book perfection. Going through every security point was as fast and easy as taking off (and then putting immediately back on) a pair of shoes. The Lufthansa flight attendants had no trouble understanding my requests for Orangensaft, and my excitement was truly irrational when the safety video, with its clearly spoken German and computer animated graphics, explained the evacuation plan. After six hours on a bus, seven in the air, and five time zone changes, I finally arrived in Berlin. As I wandered around the Capital for those first few hours, going into stores and having or just witnessing short German conversations, my mood could not have been better. At 5:00PM I collapsed on my youth hostel cot and slept through the night.
The next day was “jetzt geht’s los!” I was ripped out of the lazy lull of a tourist and thrown into high paced learning, aimed at preparing me for a semester at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Flight
As a young child I loved flying. What wasn’t to love? My parents would patiently coax me into the car, where a crazy-colored, pre-packed suitcase awaited. In the airport I was instructed by serious people to walk through a portal that determined if I would be allowed on the plane. On the plane I was showered with great snacks and lots of praise for not crying. This in addition to the most impossibly cool thing of all, YOU GOT TO FLY! The ground retreated below you as acceleration pressed you against your seat; the world was reduced to an intricate model. To think that Mom and Dad really didn’t enjoy this! Adults were such a bummer.
I have since switched sides. I go to college, drive a car, and buy my own groceries. I hate flying. Between the chore of packing and getting to the airport, the hassle of passing through security, and the reluctant consumption of low quality food, what’s not to hate?
Yet somehow I can’t help but feel some of that childhood enthusiasm returning at the notion of flying in under three weeks from New York City to Frankfurt, then on to Berlin. I will be flying via Lufthansa, which, by its German roots alone, triggers in me the excitement that I experience for so much of that nation, culture, and language. Boarding this flight will mark the beginning of the incorporation of German into every aspect of my life for the next five months. Some of the announcements over the intercom may even be made auf Deutsch!
In under three weeks English will no longer be my default language for the dozens of interactions in a typical day. When I hold the door for someone, they will likely thank me with danke. To find the bathroom I will have to ask for die Toilette. To learn the time I will have to single out a nice looking German and execute the well practiced phrase with the best accent I can muster “Wissen Sie, wie spät es ist?” I find myself thinking of these little interactions even more than the courses at Freie Universität Berlin, all of which will be taught in German. In part this is because my limited imagination is more able to conceive of the basic exchanges. But it is also because, in my pursuit to immerse in this foreign culture, I am very drawn by the idea that I will need to say some basic things so often that they will become completely instinctive to me. I look forward to being able to ask for the time without serious mental preparation and without loudly broadcasting that I just hit German soil. It may be something small, but it will be something that I’ve never experienced before.
I really don’t know what to expect this Semester, and it’s the excitement of the unknown that brings back memories of youth.
I’ll keep you posted on how it all unfolds.
Bis Dann!