The first two words of German I learned are telling. Either about the person I am, or the person who taught me the language. Or both. Those words were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny). We were living in China at that time. My husband – and teacher – was a lecturer of German to students at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing. I remember visiting an art exhibition in Beijing with them, and stopping before every painting, I would utter either “schön” or “lustig.” The weird thing was, it worked. No one was the wiser.

Actually I brought two other words to the relationship, but neither was very helpful in communicating on a daily basis. One I had learned as a teenager from the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”. “Blitzkrieg” was not a word that made small talk with Germans easy. My other word – “Oberschenkel” (thigh) might have gotten me further – faster-, but instead my husband and I started small.

He taught me all the parts of the body, one by one, and I repeated them one by one: Augen (eyes ), Nase (nose ), Mund (mouth ), Schulter (shoulders) and so on, down the line. When people ask how I learned German, I tell them “pillow talk”.