In the last of her columns on learning Italian, German teacher Renate Grasstat takes a look at clichés and how they also apply to learning a language.

If there was one thing I learned during my experience learning Italian in Milan, it was that language is a way of understanding people and culture, of the speed of life, and of the structuring of ideas. And who would deny it: Life in Italy is somehow louder, faster, more expressive and more creative than in Germany.

For example, at the beginning of this year, Milan introduced a congestion fee in order to keep the city center free from too much traffic and pollution – like in London. I was really impressed to read that many cars were trying to avoid being charged by entering the inner zones of the city backwards, so that on the surveillance cameras, they appeared to be leaving.

Wow! A German wouldn’t do that, be that kind of problem solver (I was wondering about Londoners…). Then I remembered one of my Italian students, working in a big German company, complaining to me in German class that her (German) boss had pushed aside her suggestions as being "too creative." She could not imagine this was true – Germans can. To us, too creative means too superficial, not structured well enough and too impractical.

In Germany, especially in Berlin, where I live, busses are a good example of our need to stick to the rules: one enters the bus at the front door and gets off at the back. That is so passengers won’t bump into one another in the middle, which is especially important in double-deckers. Good idea, and used in other countries as well. Anyway, the interesting part lies in the exceptions. Southern Europeans normally do not have these problems: pushing and talking helps them work things out. But in Germany, if you don’t stick to the rules, chaos is inevitable. Furthermore, the bus driver plus some others will definitely indicate in a pedantic or maybe even aggressive manner that you were the cause of the breakdown of the entire system. Being flexible when unexpected situations arise is not our strong point. I guess it is also the price we have to pay for the efficient functioning of our system and the quality of our products, which have an excellent reputation around the world.

Anyway, in trams in Milan, there were doors used as entrances and those only as exits. It took me about 10 days until I became aware of the signs, "entrata" and "uscita," on top of these doors, and I really felt embarrassed at not having respected them so far. However, no one else did either - and no one had either in a friendly, pedantic or aggressive manner, let me know. Still I could not help feeling guilty and the next time I was on a tram, I made a detour through a long wagon of the swaying tram to reach the "right" door to exit.

So do stereotypes tell the truth?

I thought yes, when I saw a large crowd of Italian business people in front of my hotel, all of them chatting wildly – with one another or with somebody on their mobile phones - or with one another and with someone on their mobile phones. But I do not want to be unfair: It was only about 20 percent who did both!

I thought no, when it came to being polite: Italians seemed to be more polite than I had expected (considering the speed which dominates most of their actions) – or is this only due to my being used to Berlin, where people are said to be extremely rude? (Especially bus drivers…!)

Clichés were applied to us Germans, too. When Constanze, Nis and I, the three Germans in our Italian language class, admitted that being late was one of our greatest weaknesses, our fellow students as well as our teachers gasped in astonishment: "But you are German!" This shocking revelation was alluded to regularly – although I can assure you that on many other occasions we obviously lived up to the image of the frankly speaking, over-analyzing and rule-abiding German very well.

These cultural peculiarities filter down into language textbooks. For example, our German textbooks for learning the language may not always be very well structured but what they are always lacking is an easy-going way of presenting the most important phenomena of the language or of showing a clear and restricted (very important for beginners!) way of using them. When they try to be "funny" I have noticed that they aren’t – at least not for most students from other countries. I am always thrilled by the pragmatic and easy approach English books offer to learn English. But this contrast may be partly due to the complexity of grammatical structures in German.

Still, I have seen several German textbooks published in the U.S. or in Great Britain, which aimed at simplifying the language. They didn’t impress me either. Many aspects were lacking or – from our point of view – merely incorrect. Anyway, they were adding to the attitude of some students from Australia I came across who could not stop asking, why, for God’s sake, we were using such utterly strange and completely unnecessary forms of words or word order. They seemed to regard the language like some awkward little whim people had invented out of sheer boredom or just to annoy them. Obviously, this isn’t the case but I admit it perhaps sometimes feels like that.

So I was facing a challenge now, seeing that our Italian book, called "Espresso," was dealing with small, clearly arranged units one by one, and our teachers managed to cover a topic like "describing people" or "asking directions" on one day or even one teaching unit of 100 minutes – which I am always trying to do while teaching German but rarely succeed. There are so many exceptions, difficult words or deviations – if not in the topic itself, at least in the materials we use. Why is it so difficult for Germans to stick to the main points? Well, I left Milan with a clear resolution to write a new textbook for learning German – when I have time – plus to be more patient with my students. And this was perhaps the most important lesson from my experience studying Italian in Milan.

19 February 2008

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