How I Mastered the German Language

When I first met my husband, I knew only two words of his language. One was “Blitzkrieg,” which all North Americans of my generation learned by watching reruns of Hogan’s Heros. The second word – ironically – was “Oberschenkel” (thigh), which was all that stuck from my efforts to teach myself German as a teenager. Our verbal interaction was limited at the beginning of our relationship, so it didn’t matter that my vocabulary was so small. Our lips and tongues were busy with other activities that did not require language.

We were living in China when we met. Once we went to an art exhibition with my husband’s students, Chinese students who were in Beijing to study German. By that time my vocabulary had doubled and I had another two words to impress my audience with. They were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny, amusing). I managed to use one of these words to describe each of the paintings we saw in that exhibition.

In 1988 China’s first Goethe Institute opened on the university campus where we lived. I enrolled immediately in Grundstufe I and excelled at my classes, jumping ahead in our lessons and learning all the answers auswendig, off by heart. My classmates were young Chinese professionals, whose employers, companies like Siemens and BASF, paid for their language training.

By the time we moved to Germany, I thought I was fluent. Until I realized there was a whole local lingo for the variety of breakfast rolls and breads at the local bakery. Until an old woman in our neighborhood looked at me suspiciously after I didn’t understand her, saying “Sie sind nicht ganz deutsch, oder?”

It was at that point that I started to ask all of our friends, many of whom had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, to speak German and German only with me. That year I had to pass the PNDS - Prüfung zum Nachweis der deutschen Sprache, the first  hurdle in the university acceptance process. It was tough. I had no idea how a language could have cases like nominativ, dativ and so on. The spelling was tortuous. My husband insisted then and will insist now that German is spelled exactly as it is spoken. Except they like the letter K so much they even put it in their Kaffee. A linguist tried to teach me when to use the Umlaut by inserting a pencil into his mouth and demonstrating that when a word has an Umlaut, the lips eject the pencil from the mouth. It’s all about the mouth in the end.

I still associate certain words with certain people. For example, our friend Michael N., who used the word “grossartig” (great, brilliant) in combination with a great guffaw; or Udo, who came from southern Germany and used the diminutive “Mädel” for girl, of which he always had several about.

Recently at work I had the opportunity to do a TV interview in German and while watching the replay, thought Scheiße, my mastery of the language had declined. I’ve decided to make more of an effort by reading German literature and not just the gossip and lifestyle magazines; by listening to books on tape rather than just radio; by speaking German to my husband instead of conducting conversations in a mish mash of English and German. Could this be another new beginning?

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