class – The Bittesuite

Post #5 – Two More Classmates, Hideki Still on his Own

Right now I would be writing about how many native Spanish speakers live in Munich, but something important developed in my German class, today. So, I’m going to save my excitement over the extra utility of my childhood Spanish classes for another day.

Two new people joined our class. I’ll call them James and Nastia. James is from the US (Los Angeles) and only speaks English. Nastia is from Belarus and only speaks Russian.

Hideki is still from Japan and only speaks Japanese.

These additions are interesting because they add balance to our roster that could be either amazing or terrible. You may have read my second post and remember that our class communicate kind of like this:

Isabella, Victor, Paulius and I make do with our various language skills and communicate with words, while Hideki is a complete boss and manages to fit in without using words (or understanding them). Seriously, that guy rules. What will happen now that our two new classmates have joined us, though? My hope is that we have more perspective. We can all compare California with Texas, and figure out how diverse the US is. We can also compare Lithuania with Belarus and learn what the two countries share besides Russian. All the while, Paulius is translating to and from Russian, and I’m translating to and from Spanish. Even typing that sentence made me want to do jumping jacks.

Isabella and Victor give us hope. From the two of them, we’ve been learning how Venezuela differs from Spain (including how Spanish differs between the two countries). What I’m worried about though, is how foreboding our class’s newfound balance is. Behold…

With the addition of these two new classmates comes the creation of comfort zones. One zone speaks English, another Russian, and a third Spanish. James and I get to practice our English, Isabella and Victor get to practice their Spanish, Nastia and Paulius get to practice their Russian, and Hideki takes residences in zone #4–the ultimate discomfort zone.

Hopefully that’s not how things work for us. Hopefully the addition of two new classmates comes with the addition of two new perspectives and languages we can all share. Hopefully we can keep getting drinks and playing nonverbal guessing games with Hideki the Boss.

Also, I’m not sure where to write this, since I don’t foresee a whole post dedicated to it, so I’ll mention it here. We were talking about sports we like to play the other day, and when I said “Ultimate Frisbee” the entire class died laughing. Welcome to Europe, American.

Post #3: A Post about Hideki

This post is going to refer to my classmates a bunch of times. If you missed my first post about them, scan it to learn whom each person is.

Hideki is the Japanese guy in my German class. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, he only speaks Japanese. So, as hard as it may sound to learn German from scratch as a westerner, this guy is having a Hell of a time. Luckily, he has a pocket PC and some translation software with him.

Anyway, his coping methods aren’t what’s important right now. What’s important is what his…linguistic situation…means for our relationships as classmates. It means that Hideki is always somehow a part of our conversations, but we have no idea how much a part of them he is. Here’s a diagram that shows how we communicate with native languages (now, at least, since our German is pitiful):

Here’s an example. Are we on the same page as Hideki, or not?

Ryan: Hideki! ‘Wie’ und ‘was?’ (Shrugs and shakes head because we haven’t learned “What’s the difference?” or “We’re confused. Do you know?” yet)

Hideki: HAHAHAHAHAHA! (while shaking head)

Either he knows what our problem is and he’s saying it’s his problem, too, or he’s telling me “sorry, I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

We all shared a similar exchange on Monday, when we introduced ourselves and talked about where we were before Germany. He kept saying “near Osaka,” and our teacher kept asking “Yeah, but from where” (“Ja, und wie heiβt?”). And he kept saying “Osaka.”

That was also before we all knew much German at all. We tried playing charades to no avail. Hideki remained a mystery.

But today: Hideki, unveiled! Sort of. Now, we’re all experts at saying where we’re from, what our hobbies are, where we live, what we do for a living, which languages we know, and some other stuff. So, today, we all went through the small talk dance, again (we had teacher #2 today, and he hadn’t heard our small talk, yet). Woher kommst du? Wo wohnst du? Hast du hobbys? Was bist du von Beruf? (“What do you do for work?”) Was ist dein hobby? Wo ist deine heimatstadt? Hat deine Heimatstadt gutes Bier? Those last two are “Where is your hometown?” and “Does your hometown have good beer?” To these, Hideki answered like this:

Heimatstadt: in Mie, Japan

Hobby: Schwimmen

Gut Bier: Nein

Beruf: Wirtschaft student

His hometown is somewhere in Mie (clearer than “near Osaka!”), he swims for his hobby, his hometown doesn’t have good beer, and he’s an economics student! Great to meet you, Hideki!

I’m especially excited after today’s conversation. We’re all shaky at communication right now, as the diagram earlier in this post points out. However, as we progress in this class, we’re all going to share German, which is nobody’s native tongue. That means when we get together, the easiest way to communicate will be abandoning our native languages in favor of this one we just learned, here. That’s fun.

Post #2: German for Non-Germans

I remember learning Spanish and Chinese in American classes. The teacher would explain one of the language’s concepts in English, then define each vocabulary word in English. Finally, we would practice in the new language. I grew accustomed to that method. It became the easy way to learn.

Now, I’m in a German class full of people who don’t speak English at all. Well, that’s not entirely true. One guy kind of speaks English. And the people teaching the class know how to speak English. They can’t, though. It would go right over most of the class’s head. While we’re on the subject, these are my classmates:

Isabella: Spanish girl who only speaks Spanish.
Victor: Venezuelan guy who only speaks Spanish.
Hideki: Japanese guy who only speaks Japanese.
Paulius: Lithuanian guy who speaks Lithuanian and some English.
Eva: German girl who is the class’s teaching assistant and speaks German and a little English and Spanish.

I’m changing each classmate’s name for this blog. Most of me thinks it would be no big deal to use their real names, but the paranoid part (read: considerate part?) of me thinks I should ask them if it’s okay before doing so. And I’m not ready for that conversation, yet. Hey, nice to meet you. I’m gonna blog about you. Can I use your real name?

Anyway, these teachers’ (there are two who alternate) approaches are different than the ones my American teachers used. The entire class is in German, so they speak in patterns until we’re able to infer the meaning of a word or phrase. For example:

“Ryan kommt aus den USA. Paulius kommt aus Litauen. Ich komme aus Deutschland. Woher kommst du, Isabella?”

At this point, we all infer that he’s talking about where we’re from, and Isabella just heard how to say it in the first person, so she can answer “Ich komme aus Spanien.” We all have an inkling that “ich” is “I,” “kommt” “kommst” and “komme” are all conjugations of some verb that means “to come” and when you want to say you’re from a place, you say “aus [the place].” It’s only been three days, but I’m thinking this is a really effective way to learn. My head hurts after three hours in a way that says that has to be the case. Anyway, it makes us think a bit harder about the language, and it forces us to bypass the awkward translation stage of learning a language (think in English, translate to German, speak in German).

So there’s a really good reason to study a language in its home country. Another one is that it’s crazy learning a language with people who speak different languages natively. You get to see, for example, which phonetics give Spaniards a tough time, and which structures give Japanese people a tough time (it would seem that all of them do in a Western language like German). Look forward to more about that in a future post.

Also, in the near future, I’ll write about my classmates’ reasons for being in Munich, InterNations–a networking group for expats (we’re going to some kind of night club party on Thursday with them)–trying to eat with a growing German vocabulary, and maybe the time I got sick after eating German quesadillas (yeah, I should have known better).

Tschüss!