Spies learn languages quickly, and with deathly precision. My experience with German, however, has been somewhat different. After over a decade of attempts, I have yet to come close to commanding the language. But while I’m far from fit to go undercover, I’m proud to say that in German I am semi-literate. And I can hold down a conversation. This is largely thanks to my latest, most serious effort which began about two years ago along with my collaboration on the group effort German Professor.
I began by traveling to southern Austria, a region I’d repeatedly been warned against for its appalling dialect. Despite its spectacular lakes and emerald countryside that lure in the German glitterati, the German word police have written it off as a linguistic wasteland.
“Shoo cont learn German in Owstwia!,” they would scold. But having actually studied linguistics, a science based on a descriptive, rather than prescriptive analysis of language, I rejected this as a snobbish trope. I will learn German where it may lie, I told myself, and the German I learn in Austria will be just as authentic as the German I could learn anywhere else!
Eight months later I was running, not walking to the airport. The word police were right. Sure, I’d learned some German during my stay in Austria, but it was only from a course taught in High German (the standard dialect) and from hanging out with exchange students from Germany. Localspeak was baffling, and most friendships with locals were necessarily conducted in the English language.
I was Berlin bound, in search of a blander dialect and a larger concentration of German speakers. If I was to melt away into the population, this was my chance. I didn’t. But I did improve my German in four crucial ways:
• “Tandem” or “language exchange”
• Making friends
• Reading books in German
• Taking a German course
Here’s how it shook out.
Tandem
Tandem is conversational meeting (usually over coffee) in which a German speaker and an English speaker divide the time between two languages. Rather than pay a tutor for an hour of German instruction or conversation practice, I could get a half hour of help in the form of casual chatting, and getting questions answered about how to say certain words or phrases in German. For the second half hour I would help my tandem partner with her English, as she was preparing for a placement test to get back into school.
I wanted to learn German slang. So she taught me that in German the hip-hop version of Wie geht’s? is Was geht? I believe it’s like the difference between “How are you?” and “Whatup?” It may seem trivial, but it actually got me a lot of mileage with the locals. It’s not like anybody mistook me for a thug from the knife crime district of Berlin, which would have been an awesome character for a spy, but at least it made people laugh and helped break the ice more than once.
Tandem was the most likely place for me to learn this piece of German slang. I wouldn’t have had the time in the German class I took, where the focus was lesson plans and grammar, nor did I ask any of my German friends teach it to me, as I didn’t want to bore them excessively with minutia about a language they generally take for granted. In Tandem I had the luxury to talk exclusively about the fun aspects of the language.
And, as an unexpected perk, my tandem partner hooked me up with a really cheap apartment in a nice part of town. (I liked to think of it as my safe house).
You can find Tandem partners in the activities section of Berlin’s Craigslist.
Making friends
I knew going into it that the most organic way for me to improve my German would be to speak solely in German with all the new people I met. I assumed all Germans spoke perfect English, so I was prepared for a challenge. But after settling in I was happily surprised: not all Germans speak English!
In fact, a couple very close friendships were conducted entirely in German. But because my German was even worse then, I couldn’t help feeling slightly suspicious of anyone who would tolerate lengthy conversation with a verbal cripple like me.
What were they getting out of it? Were they spies too?
That remains an open question, but for me the rewards were crystal clear. I got hours of real-life practice forming sentences, responding to questions, making jokes and even working through misunderstandings caused by my poor language skills. Talk about a steep learning curve. I even picked up some very practical language tips: after asking was? all the time, I was told to change it up occasionally with the more polite phrase: wie, bitte?
Of course, many Germans do speak English extremely well, and inevitably I made friends with folks who spoke only English to me. I didn’t mind the friendship, but it didn’t help my German at all. And here’s where an unbroken pattern revealed itself: the first few moments of meeting somebody would absolutely determine the language used for the life of the relationship. The second I said “Hi, how are you,” to someone, the German language was DOA.
I think the reason is because I am a different person when I speak German. I express visible glee whenever I can formulate a sentence. Time slows down and every object on the street or in the café becomes amazing, something worth inquiring about. In German, I am a child.
Once I put it to a test and tried switching to German with a friend who normally spoke English to me. It was a complete disaster. One could almost hear a grinding sound as I tried to switch gears into that friendly, lobotomized character that worked so well in German-language friendships. I smiled and blinked uncomprehendingly as a torrent of gibberish flowed from his mouth. He was baffled by my precipitous drop in IQ. It took only moments for us to switch back to English. We were both embarrassed.
Reading books
“Here, read this,” a local once told me. It was Arabboy, by Güner Balci, about a Lebanese-Palestinian boy who chooses a life of crime in the poor part of Berlin. Despite its humor, darkness and valuable insight into the immigrant experience, the prose would have bored me stiff if translated into English. But in German I am a child. And in German, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I followed it up with Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and inevitably found some parallels in the criminal heroes of both stories.
Of course, in both cases practically every sentence yielded multiple new vocabulary words. So rather than look each word up as I encountered it, I would simply write it down and move on. Only at the end of each chapter would I look up all the definitions, write them down, memorize them, then re-read the chapter with a whole new level of comprehension.
It’s work, but it works; the primary benefits were reading comprehension amassing vocabulary. But while this is not a direct method of learning grammar rules, reading hundreds of pages in German did make me more comfortable with the way German sentences are thrown together, and I actually think it even helped my spoken German.
But for real help with grammar, there’s nothing like taking a German course:
Taking German classes in Berlin
I enrolled in a German course through the Volkshochschule, which is a nationwide adult education program for lower income folk. An expat friend recommended it, but the Germans I knew would disparage it. One was concerned I’d get bored, and another, with decidedly elitist sensibilities, was uncomfortable mentioning the word in public. The course was held in a bright orange high school building from the Soviet era, located in Wedding, a district with zero popular appeal and a large working class population.
I was attracted to it because I’m cheap. A month long course involving around 80 hours of instruction cost something like 100 Euros. There were other young American expats like me in the course, along with older people who came to Germany looking for economic opportunities. Some students hailed from really exotic places like Belarus, Nigeria and the newly-formed nation of Kosova. Our instructor was very friendly but inexperienced. She spoke with a slight Turkish accent, and the course moved at a snail’s pace; per the lesson plan we wasted a lot of time in activities like making posters to pin up to the wall. Nobody liked the text book but her hands were tied, she said.
Despite these criticisms, I really did learn fundamental grammar rules that I wouldn’t have learned outside the classroom environment. No matter how inefficiently the course was run, I feel that by getting up early and putting over four hours in every day, I was bound to learn something, even if I didn’t make it through to the end of the month. If I had to do it again, I might pony up a bit more, for a faster paced and more exciting German course in Berlin. Of course, you’ll never hear about it; by the time it’s over I’ll be deep undercover.
Will Sherman is a lifelong student of German.
Cactus offers a range of German course options, including intenisve language courses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and part-time evening courses throughout the UK and North America.
