Adventures in the German language

I've been here long enough that I suppose it's time I wrote a bit about the most obvious difference between Germany and the US - namely, the language. Although I wouldn't say I'm fluent, I definitely get along and usually don't have to ask about words very often. I guess I qualify then, to some extent, as being able to speak German. So here are some of the interesting things so far.

First, the immediately noticable aspect of German for any English speaker is that, although Germany has a very formal culture, the least formal aspects of English come from German. The scientific word the Germans use for 'matter' for example is the apparent origin of the English term 'stuff.' The word that is used for 'calculate' seems to be a relative of the English verb 'to reckon.' Scholarly and formal English terms tend to be taken more from romance languages like French, directly from Latin, or in some cases from Greek. There are interesting historical reasons for this but I'm not really too familiar with them. It just comes as an amusement to me that English would be divided in such an initially non-apparent way.

I suppose I should also talk about learning the language. German is considered to be fairly difficult to learn from English - moreso than any of the Romance languages but less so than Russian, Arabic, or eastern Asian languages. Luckily I had some prior experience, through Latin, with the noun cases, so some of it came more easily to me with a relatively small amount of classroom learning amounting to two years. Despite this, I found that when I got to Germany, I couldn't get a single word of what anyone said. It's not that my class had been taught a strange dialect or anything, just that we had focused on getting the grammar and speaking down with less focus on understanding. When we did listen to things by native German speakers, they were fairly short and we generally didn't understand more than a couple words.

This would seem a disadvantage, but actually I rather prefer this method. Two years is enough time to get a basic feel for word order and how the language is spoken and set up, plus a basic vocabulary. It's very difficult, on the other hand, to learn to understand native speakers with only forty five minutes a day of lesson. So you're better off learning the basics, equivalent to two or three years of high school lessons, and then spending some time in the actual country. I did have the advantage, however, of an in-country language course to fill in the grammatical gaps.


It does surprise me how quickly the language starts to come out. A foreigner has to be careful speaking German initially, as it's possible to almost literally choke on the words if you're not used to rolling Rs in the back of your throat, for example. However, my rate of formulation and of speaking have both drastically improved at incredible paces. Using the language seems to make it stick in a weird way - it's hard to explain exactly how, but stuff starts forming itself after a while.

Language is a particular academic interest of mine, and learning German is only making me more curious. I'll probably return to this topic later.