{"id":12410,"date":"2023-02-17T16:25:02","date_gmt":"2023-02-17T20:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/?p=12410"},"modified":"2023-02-17T16:25:02","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T20:25:02","slug":"reveling-in-german","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/reveling-in-german\/","title":{"rendered":"Reveling in German."},"content":{"rendered":"

Jude Stewart writes for LitHub<\/a> about her relationship with German:<\/p>\n

Nachtr\u00e4glichkeit<\/em> (noun): \u201cAfterwardness\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every time I return to Berlin\u2014and this is now 17 years\u2019 worth of returning\u2014I also return to speaking German. I\u2019m always flooded with thoughts and observations about this return. Speaking German elicits big, inarticulate feelings: It\u2019s good, it\u2019s familiar, it\u2019s awful, it\u2019s tumultuous, it\u2019s suddenly great again. But why?<\/p>\n

German is the fourth foreign language I\u2019ve studied, the others being French, Japanese and Spanish in that order. Since childhood I\u2019ve wanted to become fluent in a foreign language\u2014any language\u2014and, before German, had only gotten maddeningly close. […]<\/p>\n

Why did I stick with German so long? Why German<\/em>? All of my answers feel like alibis, and maybe they are. Childhood ambitions don\u2019t often play out precisely as envisioned; you feel lucky if they can play out at all. […]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Flie\u00dfend<\/em> (adjective): fluent<\/strong><\/p>\n

How fluent am I really? It\u2019s a mysterious question. The answer isn\u2019t stable or absolute. It depends on a million points of context. It reflects one\u2019s lived experiences inside the language. I suppose I\u2019m fluent in German, and yet I feel provisional saying that.<\/p>\n

I usually return to Berlin rusty; because I have a monolingual child in tow, it\u2019s difficult to find flow. Yet my vocabulary has steadily grown\u201417 years of magpie word collection will do that. Since I first learned German I\u2019ve become a parent, acquiring the superpowers of split attention and automatic speech\u2014both factors that strangely help my German. But the situation leaves me stuck with go-to phrases that bore me to tears; grammatical mistakes so long-codified in memory that I don\u2019t recognize them as such; the conundrum of which language to speak with old friends I only see briefly.<\/p>\n

Anger improves my fluency, as does problem-solving, tiredness, and drinks. Distraction helps, as do actual communicative stakes. When my son Lev broke their foot by \u201cspeed-walking\u201d over a raised threshold in our apartment, I described the injury to the hospital staff. The word die Schwelle<\/em> (threshold) bobbed into consciousness suddenly like a cork. Did I actually know this word? Where did I learn it? Meanwhile the nurse just waited, mildly impatient, for me to un-pause my recital. […]<\/p>\n

Seufzen<\/em> (verb): to sigh<\/strong> <\/p>\n

In early 2021 when the vaccines had been heralded but not yet arrived, when my passport worked but not reliably, I took a Zoom conversational course in new German literature. It was laughing in the dark, cultivating foreign language skills that winter; it was something to do. But the space inside me reserved for German sprang back open, filled and stretched yet again.<\/p>\n

From this class I learned all the alternatives to writing \u201che said\u201d in literary reportage: er erwiderte<\/em> (he replied), er zustimmte<\/em> (he agreed), er hinf\u00fcgte<\/em> (he added), er seufzte<\/em> (he sighed). I also started reading German for style, measuring word choices and sentence cadence. The language\u2019s ceiling, its rhetorical possibilities, lifted so high that clouds drifted through. I had not realized how conversation\u2014even quality conversation\u2014constrains what you can experience of a language\u2019s possible effects. New words, new cadences, new formulations: we don\u2019t build or acquire complexities like these in speech. […]<\/p>\n

German changes the reading game in fundamental ways. Grammar gets foregrounded, providing crucial hints to the lost. In diagramming syntax as a reader, you palpate which words relate to which, re-tracing the author\u2019s own decisions. Sometimes the going was giddily fast, sometimes not. I learned to let it ride, not looking up every word, recognizing the mike-drop words whose meaning I needed to confirm to get the effect. But enforced slowness is inherently vivid. Difficulty always paid off in spades. My space was dark but lit by flashes of irregular lightning.<\/p>\n

Fluency in another language, I\u2019m realizing, might be a lot like adulthood: We don\u2019t know what it\u2019ll feel like until we\u2019re well into it. By the time you stop faking parenthood, your kid has almost exited the house.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nothing startlingly original, but I can’t resist these accounts of what it’s like to use another language, and a lot of it is (as the kids say) relatable. Thanks, Trevor!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jude Stewart writes for LitHub about her relationship with German: Nachtr\u00e4glichkeit (noun): \u201cAfterwardness\u201d Every time I return to Berlin\u2014and this is now 17 years\u2019 worth of returning\u2014I also return to speaking German. I\u2019m always flooded with thoughts and observations about this return. Speaking German elicits big, inarticulate feelings: It\u2019s good, it\u2019s familiar, it\u2019s awful, it\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12411,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12410\/revisions\/12411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}