Tag: ideas

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.

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:

1. Isabella: Spanish girl who only speaks Spanish.
2. Victor: Venezuelan guy who only speaks Spanish.
3. Hideki: Japanese guy who only speaks Japanese.
4. Paulius: Lithuanian guy who speaks Lithuanian and some English.
5. 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!