Written by Eddie LeShure – This story was written in July 2002 after living and working in Germany for two years.
Guten Tag:
As I’ve alluded to before, while living in Germany I’ve made an effort to learn some German. My motivation and effort have vacillated throughout my residence here due to various factors, one of which is the daunting task this represents. It’s definitely not one of the easier languages to learn, though one of my German friends once encouraged me by pointing out, “It can’t be all that hard. After all, little children learn it!”
I borrowed (stole) the title of this from Mark Twain who, after living in both Switzerland (Zurich) and Germany (Heidelberg), wrote an essay with this title in 1880 – one that I think is most aptly named. For a country that prides itself in being both logical and efficient, how did its language become so complicated and sometimes contradictory in structure? As Twain remarked, “A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is. Surely there is not another language that is so slip-shod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp.”
Let’s start with this: why does any language assign genders to nouns? Where did that bright idea ever come from? And in German, how did a spoon get to be masculine, a fork feminine, and a knife neuter? Can’t silverware at least all be the same gender? Was there no logic at all put to use here, or was this just a twisted mind at work? And as you can see the Germans just had to outdo the French and Spanish who were quite content with only two genders. No, the German language just has to have three.
Okay so, some of them are logical: an electrical plug, “der stecker”, is male, and it gets inserted into “die steckdose” (female). But then one also inserts “die Gluehbirne” (the lightbulb) into “die lampe“…both female. Since we are pursuing this line of thinking, why is a banana feminine? And please tell me how in the world could a girl, “das Maedchen”, be neuter? Maybe they considered it to be in better taste to make a less than mature female sexless? After all, in previous centuries the word for wife was “Weib” – also neuter or sexless. Do you suppose there was a rationale for this, at least from her husband’s point of view? But seriously folks, it often does seem as though there is little rhyme or reason employed when it comes to assigning genders to nouns.
As Twain observed, “…a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female – Tom-cats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart and conscience haven’t any sex at all. Now by the above dissection, the reader will see that in German a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look at the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts.”
And it gets worse – all this is just for singular form. What if a noun is plural? Then “das Buch” (the book) becomes “die Buecher” (the books). Both the article AND the spelling change. And sometimes the changes have zero logic or consistency; “das Kind” (the child) becomes “die Kinder” (the children), “der Tisch” (the table) becomes “die Tische”, “die Tomate” becomes “die Tomaten”, “die Lehrerin” (the female teacher) becomes “die Lehererinnen”, “der Stuhl” (the chair) becomes “die Stuehle”, “der Kasten” (the box) becomes “die Kaesten”. There’re more variations, but it’s getting depressing enough already, don’t you think?
But hold on, that’s just the Nominativ case. There’s the Akkusativ (when a noun becomes an object) and when “der” (the) or “ein” (a ) Tisch conveniently become “den Tisch” or “einen Tisch”. Then there’s Dativ case when it’s “dem Tisch” or “einem Tisch”, or Genitiv case when it’s “des” or “eines Tisches”. And this is merely the masculine! Confused yet? No? Then stick around, there’s more fun to be had.
When we throw in verbs the plot really thickens, thanks to “die Konjugation”. Let’s compare English and German, conjugating the verb “to come”.
ENGLISH:
I come
we/you/they come
he/she/it comes
GERMAN
ich komme (I)
Sie kommen (you – formal)
du kommst (you – informal)
er/sie/es kommt (he/she/it)
wir kommen (we)
sie kommen (they)
And if you are wondering, no this is NOT a consistent pattern one can apply with each verb. Not even close. It can get really crazy, believe me, since just when one thinks he or she has found a rule they can grab a hold of and run with, up pops an exception. And then another. And so on. It starts to feel as though you are running through a linguistic minefield.
Then there are despicable little beasts called “trennbare” verbs. Trennbare means detachable or separable, which means we must cut the verb in two, putting half of it somewhere in the sentence, and then sticking the other half of it somewhere at the end. For example, let’s take the sentence, “The instruction starts at 8 o’clock” and use the verb “anfangen”, which means: to begin or start. In German this is written, “Der Unterricht faengt um 8 Uhr an.” Isn’t this fun? And I kept the sentence very short and simple for our example. As Twain writes, “The German language is blistered all over with separable verbs, and the wider the two portions of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.”
On top of that, the language has a propensity for creating nouns that are absolutely massive in size. Twenty letters or more is commonplace, and thirty letters is not unheard of:
Erziehungsberechtigten
Verfahrensanweisungen
Datenverzeichnisstrukturen
Minamalanforderungen
Sozialraumorientierung
Wohnungsbaugesellschaften
Fachleistungsstunden
Verfahrensverantwortlicher
Go ahead and try wrapping your tongue around a few of them – and don’t forget the correct gender. By the way, I found these on a couple of pages of a work report of Heide’s that I spotted lying around our flat. There was no need to go digging for them – there are tons of these monsters everywhere. However, if you try to look them up in your German/English dictionary you might not find them as many are actually compound nouns without any hyphens, created by just sticking two or more words together. Imagine decades ago, when the word “computer” was created, if someone had instead just come up with the word “electronicdevicetoquicklystoreandprocessdata”. It seems to me that that’s how it’s done in German. Thank goodness they decided to adopt the word computer.
On the bright side regarding nouns, in case you haven’t noticed, at least the masochists who invented this language had the decency to capitalize nouns so hapless readers like you and I can spot the rascals straight away! Quoting Twain again, “Now that is a good idea, and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous in its loneliness.”
Let’s move on to pronouns. This is great fun too, especially when there are three different words for “you”. You is “du” if you’re on an friendly, informal basis, but “Sie” if you’re not. How do you know which one to use in various given situations? Take it from me, that can be a bit tricky (and potentially embarrassing), especially in a country where colleagues can work together in the same office for twenty years and yet might still refer to each other in the formal “Sie” form. More than once I’ve had friends or students tell me about having asked permission from someone else to speak to them in the “du”, rather than the “Sie” form…and then being refused. Ouch!
Plus, “you” in the plural form is “ihr”. And “sie” or “Sie” can also mean “she”, “her”, “they”, “them”, or sometimes “it”. A particular flower shop I’ve often traveled by is named, “Blumen Fur Sie”. Since all the letters of the sign are capitalized, here’s a question one might ponder: is it, “Flowers For You”, “Flowers For Her”, “Flowers For Them”, “Flowers For It”? Just who or what the hell am I supposed to buy the flowers for?
Since I never really studied adjectives I cannot tear them apart, but according to Twain, memorizing the various forms “will make you a candidate for an asylum.”
Another point regarding this language is the sound of it. Few would ever claim that it’s pleasant to the ear, and I’ve had several Germans ask me something along the line of, “Doesn’t our language sound quite harsh?” My answer usually is, “Well, uh… since you’ve asked, actually yes!” I cannot ever imagine Khalil Gibran, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, or Rumi weaving their literary tapestries in German. For example, even “I love you” can come out sounding like a command – “Ich liebe Dich”!
But let’s look on the bright side of things: there are many words in German that are similar, or even identical, to English, though they might be pronounced differently. In addition to a few you may have already spotted, there is: Steak, Butter, Milch, Joghurt, Salat, Orange, Reis, Kaffee, Tee, Glas, Wein, Bier, Telefon, Foto, Bus, Original, Radio, Musik, Disco, Zigarette, Kamera, Gangster, Name, Expertise, Kondom, Student, Freund, Baby and lots more. And there are some German words or expressions that have been adopted by Americans and which are already familiar to us, like “Kindergarten” and “gesundheit”. So an English speaker learning German already gets a head start with many words. All they have to do is learn the gender and pronunciation of each word and then figure out how to string them all together in a way that makes sense.
More good news is that, as in Spanish, a word generally sounds the way it is spelled. You don’t encounter such perversions of illogic from English as “through” sounding exactly the same as “threw” …likewise “close” and “clothes”, or “read” being pronounced two different ways depending on what tense it is. Of course some of the sounds in German are difficult to master and I frequently find my listeners looking at me dumbfounded after I’ve just said something perfectly…I thought. For me the “ch” sound always seems to come out wrong…as in J.S. Bach? It should be a bit like clearing your throat, but I usually feel self-conscious trying to pull it off and then I get one of those “Huh?” looks.
But in general, Germans are thrilled that anyone living here is trying to learn their language (in fact some of them can get a bit aggressive about insisting on it!), so they usually encourage you and are often more than happy to correct your mistakes. In addition, most Germans can speak English at least passably, if not quite well (exceptions being those quite old or those who lived in former East Germany).
An interesting side note though is, if you ask them, “Sprechen Sie English?” (Do you speak English?), they’re likely to respond, “a little”, when in fact they probably studied it for about eight years in school, have traveled some in English-speaking countries, and are probably better at it than G. W. Bush. (I know, I know, that’s not THAT hard to do.) But when you ask an American if they speak another language they will say, for instance, “Oh yeah, Spanish!”, when it turns out that they took two years of it in high school about a millennium ago and can now accomplish little more in that language than ordering a beer and asking where the bathroom is.
There’s a bit of squabbling among various speakers of German regarding the many dialects and accents in this language. For instance, most Berliners moan about “that horrible Swabian” spoken in the southwestern part of their country. “I can almost not understand them!” they’ll exclaim. But then the Swabians bitch about how the Bavarians in the southeast of Germany speak. The Bavarians, in turn, shake their heads in disbelief at the dialect in the northwestern Cologne region. Almost all Germans dislike hearing the Austrian version and pretty much all agree that the German that is spoken in Switzerland is not really German at all. While all this is going on, those around Hanover sit back smugly and claim that they and they alone actually speak “High German”. Well, la di da!
But unless it is something complicated, I usually manage to get by everywhere with my lousy survival German. Regardless of what part of Germany I am in, or even if I am in Austria or Switzerland, the different dialects make little difference to me as I pretty much suck at it everywhere. But, I still usually manage okay in stores and restaurants and while exchanging pleasantries and asking and answering basic questions here and there. I often get asked for directions while I am walking around or waiting for trains and buses and I actually amaze myself when I can assist them in German. But what is really funny is when I ask a question or order something to eat or drink in German and immediately get a response back in English, as if to put us both out of our misery. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of my German skills.
Speaking of survival German, if you’re learning the language, there are three expressions that are essential to general conversation, and if one listens in when others are speaking you will hear them again and again. Learn them – they’re invaluable.
The first is “genau”, which means “exactly” or “precisely”, as in, “This is our train coming, right?”………”Genau.”
The second is “ach so”, which means “oh” or “I see”, said with a bit of surprise, as in, “The reason I’m running is that we need to get on this train now or we’ll miss it!”…..…. “Ach so!”
The third is “scheisse” which means “shit”, as in, “There it goes, we just missed our train!!”…….. “Scheisse!!!”
The next language I will soon be tackling is Bahasa Indonesian and I’m delighted to discover in my research on it that it is “a mercifully easy language to pick up – there’re no tenses, genders or articles, and sentence structure is relatively simple.” (Indonesian Handbook). After all the headaches I have had with German, I think this is just what the doctor ordered, don’t you?
Tschuss,
Fast Eddie
Eddie LeShure is an insight meditation teacher and substance abuse counselor whose primary passion is bringing mindfulness practice into the realms of addiction recovery, trauma relief, and self-care. He teaches and leads groups in various treatment and recovery settings, as well as in series classes, workshops, retreats, conferences and conventions.
Eddie began meditating in the early ‘80s, regularly teaches at Asheville Insight Meditation, is a NAMI Family Support Group Facilitator, and is co-founder of A Mindful Emergence, LLC (amindfulemergence.com).
These days, Eddie’s writing centers around his teaching and presentations, but in the past it was quite different. He chronicled and displayed his adventures around the world for several years under the banner, “On the Road With Fast Eddie,” and in more recent times numerous articles on the local jazz scene were published in Rapid River Arts & Culture as “WNC Jazz Profiles.”
Eddie is now co-authoring a manual for treatment centers which focuses on integrating mindfulness practices with stages of addiction recovery.