The Art of Deutsching

I took my German Level I final this morning, and despite the handful of grammar questions I may or may not have gotten completely wrong, and the fact that I only got one hour of sleep after trying to memorize verb conjugations at the last minute, I left the exam hall feeling - dare I say - just a tiny bit triumphant. Fourteen weeks ago, my knowledge of the German language was essentially limited to football terms and the Der Guten Tag Hop Clop song from The Producers. This morning, I read and understood entire paragraphs of grammatically perfect German. PARAGRAPHS.

I speak three languages already, but I never had to learn them according to a structured curriculum, or from a textbook - I suppose I simply absorbed everything, from daily conversations to cartoons and books, to the point where I was already more than fairly fluent by the time I set foot in kindergarten. And that is essentially the case for most Malaysian kids - the majority of us speak multiple languages, and we learned them all in the most informal of ways, in early childhood. Which is why sitting down in German class at 8am and attempting to differentiate between the nominative and the accusative cases was such a tremendous pain in the ass. I had never cared about grammar and rules before. And the language itself did not help you out much - three different genders for nouns, verbs that could break in half and wander off to separate ends of a sentence, and more structural rules than you can shake a bratwurst at.

No Germany, fuck you.

But the rewards that came with doggedly learning up charts, and listing conjugations until your brain is reciting habe-hast-haben-hat-haben-habt-haben on zombie autopilot? Worth it. When you finally understand what the overly-chirpy people on the lesson CD-ROMs are talking about. For every grammatically perfect sentence you write out. For every set of verb conjugations you can rattle off without, for once, glancing at your notes. Re-watching X-Men : First Class and realizing that you now pretty much understand everything Kevin Bacon and Baby Magneto were saying in the opening concentration camp scenes.Learning a new language has been tremendously satisfying, and the most exciting part is that there is still so much left to learn.

The downside to spending so much time on grammar is that we kind of lost out on the vocabulary portion. It was only when conversations like this started happening;

roommate : Oh you're learning a language! That's so cool! So what's cat in German?
me            : ....I may have to look that up. Thank you for your enthusiasm.

;that we realized how many more words we still have to learn. I'm all for it though ; I've got a dictionary, and audio lessons on my laptop, and holidays coming up. It's the perfect opportunity to improve on my elementary German and become one step closer to seducing Mats Hummels. Because that was the plan all along, you know.

Graffiti has never before been so utterly relevant to my life and its priorities.

Now, I leave you with my favourite German word of forever.

BAP's Favourite German Word of Forever

Der kugelschreiber.




There's nothing inherently special about the word. It's just incredibly hilarious when you yell it at people. No really, try.

KUGELSCHREIBER!


Now who wants to sign up for Beginner's Spanish with me next year?