Getting German Wrong Until It's Right

Ein bier, bitte!

I started learning German after I found a job in Germany in 2014. It wasn't a serious effort, just a free app, but my intention was to get a head start before I arrived.

After a few days in Germany, I knew an app wasn't going to cut it. My new employers had promised German lessons, so I doubled my efforts on the cheapskate app while I awaited the real thing. By the time my employers said there wouldn't be lessons after all, the app told me I had 26 percent fluency.

Of course, that number was bullshit.

Learning a language is like hiking. You can study maps of the trail, check the elevation, and buy some comfy boots, but you have no idea what you're in for until you start hit the trail. It might be rockier and much steeper than you anticipated, maybe the air is a little thinner up there too. You don't know anything about the trail until you start walking it.

When I started German class, I noticed that despite the hours of tapping and swiping at my app, I couldn't speak the language in a pinch. Slowly, I realized you learn a language by doing it.

The novice German speaker practicing his skills in public encounters two types of Germans. There are the sympathetic Germans who nod encouragingly at your clumsy efforts. And there's those who are annoyed with your crappy German: "You're in Germany! Why can't you speak German yet?"

The first group has some lingual empathy, often from pecking at another language, and understand the notorious difficulties of learning any language, especially German.

Take the pronoun sie. It can mean she, her, it, they, them, or the polite you. I must listen carefully for the conversation's context to understand if a German speaker is talking to my group, addressing me politely, or questioning my manhood.

This would lead you to believe the German language is running low on words, but this is a language whose precision gives you so many lovely words, like Treppenwitz, as in stair joke, that witty comeback you thought of after you've left the room and walked down the stairs.

That precision also gives it those frighteningly long compound nouns, like Rentenversicherungsverlaub, which is a pension insurance thingy I recently picked up from a few different government offices.

The native German speaker, like the native speaker of any language, has been using their language since childhood, so they sometimes take the utter strangeness of their grammar for granted. There are masculine, feminine, and neutral nouns. There are three cases for articles: nominative, accusative, and goddamn dative… oh! and the forgotten fourth, genitive. Which case you use depends on what's happening to the nouns in the sentence.

That means there are seven versions of the (der, die, das, den, dem, der, des) and another six versions of a (ein, eine, einen, einem, einer, eines).

You might be able to study your way into memorizing when to use them but there are exceptions, and the German speaker's language, despite their stereotype as a rule-and-regulation-loving race, is riddled with just as many exceptions as rules. Plus, I haven't even touched the subject of verbs, which is another lengthy blogpost you're apt to skip.

German is difficult. So is English or French. As a Canadian I was taught French for over ten years in elementary and high school. We wrote out verb conjugations and memorized noun genders. I didn't really learn French until I moved to Montreal and took an intensive class, where we had to speak French in class.

As I listened to and spoke French, I developed a sense of what sounds right and wrong, what sounds masculine or feminine. Think of it like tuning an instrument, you never know it's flat until you play it. Then you hear it's off and make adjustments and play it and make more adjustments until it sounds right.

You can study. You can memorize. You won't learn a thing until you find your feet and find your voice, and get out there and keep getting it wrong until you get it right.