Sun, 21 March 2010
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A certificate claims that Shona Riddell can now speak above average German. But can she really? And what perilous path did she travel to be able to decline verbs and speak words of ten syllables?When I first arrived in Germany a few years ago, stumbling off the plane in a jet-lagged stupor, I could manage little more in German than blessing people with a 'Gesundheit!' when they sneezed.
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Learning a language is not necessarily all hard work |
It was cold and late at night and I had to find my way from one side of Berlin to the other, including catching a bus that was replacing U-Bahn services while a line was fixed. Bemusing the bus driver with some theatrical sign language, I managed to communicate where I needed to go.
It is possible to get by (sometimes) without a thorough grasp of German, but in the long-term it helps to make a little more of an effort. Learning a new language is a challenge, to say the least, and the quirks of the German language can drive one to nervous tics and tears. But the perplexing rules all muddle together eventually. Here are the typical stages of a German language learner, based on my years of blood, sweat and grammar tables.
Stage One: Denial and Complaining
The author Mark Twain felt so strongly after a few months of learning German that he wrote a long essay called 'The Awful German Language'. “Surely there is not another language that is so slip-shod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp,” he complained.
In his essay/cathartic rant, Twain runs through the language’s most annoying qualities, including confusing noun genders (der, die or das). “A tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter, horses are sexless, dogs are male, and cats are female.” He despairs over all its cases (nominative, accusative, dative), declaring that anyone who attempts to learn the rules of declination are “candidates for a lunatic asylum”. He also questions why so many verbs have to be piled up at the end of a sentence (“haben gehabt werden gewesen sein”) and imagines that under the pressure of a deadline, German newspapers must sometimes have to go to press without getting to the verb at all.
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