I've enjoyed being the foreigner again, rather than "just another american", or, as it is more likely consciously put, "just like everyone else". Here I am "the" american, and if a qualifier is necessary, I am "the" american who speaks Germans well. I'm quite confident it is the sole reason they invite me to parties and dinner and such--there has to be SOME reason why people put up with me. Not to make fun of my Germany, but to rather be surprised by the random words I happen to know. It becomes a kind of game, to see if they can throw some word at me and I can come up with the english equivalent. Or a battle of aphorisms, to see who can come up with the most proverbs in a row, in a singular non sequiteur:
Me: "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
Them: "oh yeah? well, the early bird gets the worm"
Me: "yes, but a penny saved is a penny earned"
Them: "absence makes the heart grow fonder"
Me: "all bark and no bite"
Them: "as much use as a handbrake on a canoe"
Me: ARRRGH
I usually lose. I don't have a quarter century's experience in collecting curiously coined phrases pertaining to time-honored wise-cracks. Usually I come up with something utterly bizarre which, while technically an expression in the German language, is so obscure and outdated that one might, perhaps, a very long time ago under barely memorable circumstances, have heard it from one's grandmother. Which makes it therefore hilarous coming from a 20-something American.
Then there are my "legendary" language mix-ups. I once tried to execute (as in, death penalty) a bit of mobile shelving (I wasn't even angry; the word I was looking for was to "erect" the shelving, which is unfortunately closely related). I told someone that there were condoms in my marmalade (preservatives are things used in jams and jellies, but Preservativen are condoms in German; Konsivierungsstoffe are used in German jam. Oops. There are probably dodgy jokes that may be made of this.
Anyways, I am flying to Spain tomorrow and coming back to good ol Germany by way of Belgium and Holland, where I've never been but where it rains a lot and I hear they have smashing chocolate. Oh, and it rains. The bikes are nice, too. And sometimes it rains. So in order to make myself familiar with the netherlands, I youtubed around and ended up with....this:
To those of you familiar with Dutch camping vans on the Autobahn:
And I wanted to write more, but instead I ended up watching youtube videos about Fernando Torres, whom I swear I am going to marry if I can ever meet. ANYways... saluto et goodnight.
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Monday, July 07, 2008
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Snip snip snippets
In no particular order:
1. I am of the steadfast and unyielding opinion that the word 'like' should be permanently banned from the English language. Everyone knows how a valley girl sounds, but the grossly inappropriate usage of the L-word has become établié, so ubiquitous as to be completely, totally, and in all other ways unavoidable. Not only does it grate most unpleasantly on the ears, this annoying interjection reduces the average IQ of any statement by an automatic 50%. Minimum. It is impossible—and I use the word with full cognizance of its finality and nevertheless in firm insistence of its appropriateness—to sound intelligent while interjecting ‘like’ with all the enthusiasm and unconsciousness of a four-year-old with Tourette’s. “Don’t you, like, think that if we’re talking about, like, relative deprivation as the, like, cause of ethnic conflict, wouldn’t that, like, be supporting the, like, economic causes theory?” I kid you not. It happens. It denigrates an otherwise intelligent—or at least comprehensible—comment appropriate to a college student and reduces it to the intellectual and linguistical equivalent of picking your nose: not to be done in public, appetite-reducing for the poor souls in your vicinity, and if you’re lucky, you won’t have to eat it (you know, like, your words). Rant over.
2. Wait, new rant. I hate TV. A lot. And more every day. I think it has passed the point where you could convince me that TV is worthwhile, or even remotely interesting. It is noise, and always on, and irritating. My attention span is somewhere between that of a goldfish and that of a shoelace when it comes to TV, I can’t be bothered to watch it for more than ten minutes. But most of the time, I just want it to be turned off (for a change!).
3. Autumn is coming. We had the first cold and icky day since I’ve been here; it’s been good sleeping and good running, and makes me not feel so bad to be inside.
4. I want to steal people’s bicycles. Basically, anyone with a nice road bike. I’m not too picky.
5. We’re building a refugee camp out of cardboard boxes next week for an awareness activity about Darfur. It’s going to be pretty sweet, and pretty cool looking (I think).
6. I really like having my own bathroom, rather than sharing it with between two and five or six other people (depending on whose boyfriends were over). I miss living with cool people with whom I have some sort of a relationship. I enjoy having a living room, I guess, though I can never use it. The yard is cool too.
7. Turns out I don’t like driving all that much, only in the mountains with a fun car. Give me a bike (see no 4) any day.
8. You meet cool people in libraries. Librarians are cool people, though I don’t know if we qualify as actual real live librarians. Mostly we explain thirty thousand times a day how to look up books and how people can look up the books themselves so we don’t have to.
9. I know more people than I thought I did. Lots of cool people are gone from work but some are still there, and the new ones seem dece. I have classes with friends, astoundingly enough, and run into acquaintances with relative regularity. People remember my face, which is surprising and often more than I can say for them. One guy actually remembered I speak German, which is funny as I always used to completely omit his face from my memory and would be utterly surprised when he would speak to me in German elsewhere on campus and not just in the library. Goes to show you my memory for faces is contextually dependent.
10. Intro classes suck. Makes me wonder how half these kids got out of high school, honestly. I used to think my brother was overdoing the intellectual elitism regarding his classes, which he claimed were all too simple—but now I am starting to agree. I’m not particularly impressed by the level of thinking done by 95% of the people in five sixths of my classes. Also see comment no 1.
11. But most of my instructors are really good. The intro to astronomy and anthropology are taught by interesting people who make an effort, and they present the material in a way I understand. History is bearable if dry, and politics is really interesting even though I’ve already covered all the material thus far with various past research papers.
12. I don’t like reading as much at night. Which is why I am writing and not reading an article on mediation.
13. My to-do list has 23 items on it. C’est ma vie. Speaking of which, one of those items is to have my French evaluated. Turns out I don’t speak French, but I’ve decided I want to move to Belgium next summer, so I suppose I ought to one of these days.
14. I can highly recommend Pandora.com, as an internet radio (“music genome project”) which suggests songs you may like based on characteristics of music you have given in your preference. So far, I have come up with a ton of great artists, including John Butler Trio, Matt Wertz, Hello Saferide, Ellis Paul, KT Tunstall (I knew of her before), Brett Dennen, and others.
15. I've pretty much stopped drinking coffee, except on occasional days when I remember to bring spare change. I miss it, in that I enjoy the taste, but I don't have coffee cravings. I find Bagels to be pretty fantastic, particularly with humous, and I miss Brötchen.
16. My experiment: make it through the week on the food I bought on Sunday. Progress: haven’t starved yet. PS: wasabi peas are addictive.
Good night!
1. I am of the steadfast and unyielding opinion that the word 'like' should be permanently banned from the English language. Everyone knows how a valley girl sounds, but the grossly inappropriate usage of the L-word has become établié, so ubiquitous as to be completely, totally, and in all other ways unavoidable. Not only does it grate most unpleasantly on the ears, this annoying interjection reduces the average IQ of any statement by an automatic 50%. Minimum. It is impossible—and I use the word with full cognizance of its finality and nevertheless in firm insistence of its appropriateness—to sound intelligent while interjecting ‘like’ with all the enthusiasm and unconsciousness of a four-year-old with Tourette’s. “Don’t you, like, think that if we’re talking about, like, relative deprivation as the, like, cause of ethnic conflict, wouldn’t that, like, be supporting the, like, economic causes theory?” I kid you not. It happens. It denigrates an otherwise intelligent—or at least comprehensible—comment appropriate to a college student and reduces it to the intellectual and linguistical equivalent of picking your nose: not to be done in public, appetite-reducing for the poor souls in your vicinity, and if you’re lucky, you won’t have to eat it (you know, like, your words). Rant over.
2. Wait, new rant. I hate TV. A lot. And more every day. I think it has passed the point where you could convince me that TV is worthwhile, or even remotely interesting. It is noise, and always on, and irritating. My attention span is somewhere between that of a goldfish and that of a shoelace when it comes to TV, I can’t be bothered to watch it for more than ten minutes. But most of the time, I just want it to be turned off (for a change!).
3. Autumn is coming. We had the first cold and icky day since I’ve been here; it’s been good sleeping and good running, and makes me not feel so bad to be inside.
4. I want to steal people’s bicycles. Basically, anyone with a nice road bike. I’m not too picky.
5. We’re building a refugee camp out of cardboard boxes next week for an awareness activity about Darfur. It’s going to be pretty sweet, and pretty cool looking (I think).
6. I really like having my own bathroom, rather than sharing it with between two and five or six other people (depending on whose boyfriends were over). I miss living with cool people with whom I have some sort of a relationship. I enjoy having a living room, I guess, though I can never use it. The yard is cool too.
7. Turns out I don’t like driving all that much, only in the mountains with a fun car. Give me a bike (see no 4) any day.
8. You meet cool people in libraries. Librarians are cool people, though I don’t know if we qualify as actual real live librarians. Mostly we explain thirty thousand times a day how to look up books and how people can look up the books themselves so we don’t have to.
9. I know more people than I thought I did. Lots of cool people are gone from work but some are still there, and the new ones seem dece. I have classes with friends, astoundingly enough, and run into acquaintances with relative regularity. People remember my face, which is surprising and often more than I can say for them. One guy actually remembered I speak German, which is funny as I always used to completely omit his face from my memory and would be utterly surprised when he would speak to me in German elsewhere on campus and not just in the library. Goes to show you my memory for faces is contextually dependent.
10. Intro classes suck. Makes me wonder how half these kids got out of high school, honestly. I used to think my brother was overdoing the intellectual elitism regarding his classes, which he claimed were all too simple—but now I am starting to agree. I’m not particularly impressed by the level of thinking done by 95% of the people in five sixths of my classes. Also see comment no 1.
11. But most of my instructors are really good. The intro to astronomy and anthropology are taught by interesting people who make an effort, and they present the material in a way I understand. History is bearable if dry, and politics is really interesting even though I’ve already covered all the material thus far with various past research papers.
12. I don’t like reading as much at night. Which is why I am writing and not reading an article on mediation.
13. My to-do list has 23 items on it. C’est ma vie. Speaking of which, one of those items is to have my French evaluated. Turns out I don’t speak French, but I’ve decided I want to move to Belgium next summer, so I suppose I ought to one of these days.
14. I can highly recommend Pandora.com, as an internet radio (“music genome project”) which suggests songs you may like based on characteristics of music you have given in your preference. So far, I have come up with a ton of great artists, including John Butler Trio, Matt Wertz, Hello Saferide, Ellis Paul, KT Tunstall (I knew of her before), Brett Dennen, and others.
15. I've pretty much stopped drinking coffee, except on occasional days when I remember to bring spare change. I miss it, in that I enjoy the taste, but I don't have coffee cravings. I find Bagels to be pretty fantastic, particularly with humous, and I miss Brötchen.
16. My experiment: make it through the week on the food I bought on Sunday. Progress: haven’t starved yet. PS: wasabi peas are addictive.
Good night!
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Gottesbelästigung und Nagelknöpfe
This may not sound like the profound and utter revelation that this is--in fact, you may relegate it to the category of N.S.S.: No shit, stupid--but I assure you, this is big:
I write English better than I write German.
Obvious, right? Okay, so forget about the revelation part, this isn't Genesis or anything. It was worth a try, though.
My boyfriend's theory is that there are two distinct versions of me, an English one and a German one. As a student of politics I know to sit the fence on this one, and neither agree nor disagree, as I would imaginably be a rather poor and subjective judge. In any case, I apparently have a different sense of humor and methods of expression depending on the language I am speaking, some kind of linguistically induced multiple personality syndrome. And I guess his humor is distinct, depending on whether or not he and Leo are writing me in English or auf Deutsch.
I have managed to surprise the occasional unwary and unsuspecting German into thinking I am someone from Sachsen or something, a fellow Landesleut from a different neck of the woods, but my true colors show and within a short amount of time they figure out what I'm trying to pull. An example: I recently tried to explain blasphemy on a particularly English day, and all I could come up with was Gottesbelästigung (the actual word is Gotteslästerung), which is something approximate to assaulting God, the kind of assault usually preceded with "sexual". Way to go, points for the home team. Round two: Nagelknöpfe, which, instead of referring to the heads of nails in plurality, instead refers to the buttons of nails, which don't exist--not even in singular.
I blame my lacking German competencies on the American educational system and on my miserable career as a Germanist. The educational system, as it waits till college to encourage you to take a foreign language. The other reason, far more grevious and perhaps incorrigible, is the fact that most of the German literature I have read (Harry Potter does not count) has been in translation. Bachmann, Goethe, Nietzsche, Heine, Aichinger.... English, the lot of them. Please, don't throw anything, it wasn't my fault: the lacking enrichment of vocabulary was due to an insidious plot to ruin my life on the behalf of my profs.See, were I to write this post in German, a) three of my four regular readers would probably not understand it, and b) I would have had to look up words like insidious (heimtückisch), incorrigible (unverbesslich) or perhaps unsuspecting (arglos). And as you all well know, I'm a pretty lazy person.
So: suggestions for phenomenal (sagenhaft) German prose, with which I have any hope of ameliorating (verbessern ....boring word) my disappointingly (enttäuschend) restricted vocabulary and my stilted (gespreizt or gestelzt) style?
Monday, February 26, 2007
Um.... Veil of Ignorance, anyone? Or veil of verbal incontinance?
I won't take much of your time, ye honored reader, mostly because I haven't got much of it myself, or better said, such time as I have is better spent waging war with my computer and my paper (not the same thing--the first is inhibited by the pile of keys sitting on the table next to the keyboard, and the second is inhibited by the fact that I have been sitting in this chair about 80% of the last twelve hours).
This may come out as a bit of typographical expressionism, a linguistical Wassily Kadinsky, with much enthusiasm, little forethought, and a deep and profound happiness not to be writing about Justice With A Capital J. It's harder to do Eddie Izzard-style tranitions in writing, but I suppose I can non-sequit with the best of them, so I will try.
So, Language. Learning language is fun. I do it every day. If I had been smart I would've written down all the funny and stupid and hilarious and inappropriate things I've inadvertently said in the course of learning German, but because I wasn't, I'll have to suffice with some of the more recent examples.
"Bubble Orchester?" (b.l.a.s.e.n.o.r.c.h.e.s.t.e.r: he looks confused. bemused. more bemused than confused. I'm explaining with enthusiasm why I couldn't pay attention in class because a marching band was wandering around under the window--true story) "You mean a wind ensemble?" (b.l.a.s.o.r.c.h.e.s.t.e.r is what I wanted to say. certain friends pointed out the other possible mis-interpretations of the first spelling; I will leave that one up to the German speakers.)
My bike has no light on it, speaking of changing lanes without signaling. Every week something else is wrong with it, and I have jiggled all wires, turned all the screws and bent and pulled and tried and still no luck. So I am now practicing the quick-jump-off-and-pretend-I-was-pushing-all-along manoeuvre, in case the police come.
Running a red light at 3 AM at an empty intersection? 90€
Taking the tram without a pass? €40
Riding without a light? €10
...
Knowing you're rebelling in a country where that Just Isn't Done? Priceless. There are some things money can't by, and for everything else there's an Überweisung.
You know what I dislike? Potatoes. I don't hate them, I just have a certain lack of respect for them--potatoes are not elegant or glamorous, they are knobby and brown and not even a proper sphere and you have to scrub them or peel them or somehow turn them into something edible, which is anyways a lot of work and boring and gives you blisters in strange places or verschrümpfelt your hands. Pommes de terre, c'est tout. Yet in comparison to their shiny red and green friends, to those spherical objects of biblical and mythological reference, they are lowly, and not just geographic. And they taste, more or less, like the seasonings in which they were cooked, kind of like Tofu except without the health benefits. I wonder what the total historical death toll of the potato is? The potatoes of mass destruction (vgl. 1849 Ireland).... I like the sound of that...send in the troops...
This may come out as a bit of typographical expressionism, a linguistical Wassily Kadinsky, with much enthusiasm, little forethought, and a deep and profound happiness not to be writing about Justice With A Capital J. It's harder to do Eddie Izzard-style tranitions in writing, but I suppose I can non-sequit with the best of them, so I will try.
So, Language. Learning language is fun. I do it every day. If I had been smart I would've written down all the funny and stupid and hilarious and inappropriate things I've inadvertently said in the course of learning German, but because I wasn't, I'll have to suffice with some of the more recent examples.
"Bubble Orchester?" (b.l.a.s.e.n.o.r.c.h.e.s.t.e.r: he looks confused. bemused. more bemused than confused. I'm explaining with enthusiasm why I couldn't pay attention in class because a marching band was wandering around under the window--true story) "You mean a wind ensemble?" (b.l.a.s.o.r.c.h.e.s.t.e.r is what I wanted to say. certain friends pointed out the other possible mis-interpretations of the first spelling; I will leave that one up to the German speakers.)
My bike has no light on it, speaking of changing lanes without signaling. Every week something else is wrong with it, and I have jiggled all wires, turned all the screws and bent and pulled and tried and still no luck. So I am now practicing the quick-jump-off-and-pretend-I-was-pushing-all-along manoeuvre, in case the police come.
Running a red light at 3 AM at an empty intersection? 90€
Taking the tram without a pass? €40
Riding without a light? €10
...
Knowing you're rebelling in a country where that Just Isn't Done? Priceless. There are some things money can't by, and for everything else there's an Überweisung.
You know what I dislike? Potatoes. I don't hate them, I just have a certain lack of respect for them--potatoes are not elegant or glamorous, they are knobby and brown and not even a proper sphere and you have to scrub them or peel them or somehow turn them into something edible, which is anyways a lot of work and boring and gives you blisters in strange places or verschrümpfelt your hands. Pommes de terre, c'est tout. Yet in comparison to their shiny red and green friends, to those spherical objects of biblical and mythological reference, they are lowly, and not just geographic. And they taste, more or less, like the seasonings in which they were cooked, kind of like Tofu except without the health benefits. I wonder what the total historical death toll of the potato is? The potatoes of mass destruction (vgl. 1849 Ireland).... I like the sound of that...send in the troops...
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