Amerikaner in Berlin III: Die Sprache und so weiter

I learned my first German words in High School. For four years I studied the language and gained a command formidable enough to enable me to earn eight university credits by sitting an exam one afternoon. This was the equivalent of stealing two full university semesters, or one academic year, and I didn't have to crack open a German language book to do it.

That was in 1984. Of course the interim 26 years have left my abilities a bit flat. I can barely order a Schnitzel now without making a grammatical error, or just flubbing the nouns entirely. I've spent much of the past month working in Berlin in a state of angst (a German word, by the by, if one capitalises the 'A,' as one is required to do with all German nouns) and have spoken very little in public, such is my fear of getting it so terribly wrong. However, I have soldiered through, gotten somewhat past it, and also spent a great deal of my free time attempting to communicate with a German friend whose grasp of English is only slightly less shitty than my residual knowledge of his mother tongue.

A few truths about the language have revealed themselves in the meantime, most of which I somehow missed during my formal education, and some of which I already knew about but with which I have become painstakingly reacquainted. I hope you find the following informative and not too preclusive to pursuing any interest you may have had in the German language.

1. The accent is just about always on the first syllable.

I read somewhere, probably a guidebook as I was on holiday in Prague at the time, that every Czech word, no matter how many syllables make it up, is stressed up front. STARopramen, for example. It only hit me a couple days ago that German very closely follows this convention. Here are a few words off the top of my head that fit the bill:

WENiger - less, fewer, minus
TROTZdem - nevertheless
ARbeitsgeber - employer (literally, 'work giver')
BAHNhof - railway station
KERZe - candle
FERNseh - television
DONnerstag - Thursday
Abendessen - dinner
FRUEstueck - breakfast

In the course of this exercise, I've also discovered a few notable exceptions:

geNUG - enough
proBIERen - to try, to practice
zuSAMmen - together
GarNELen - prawns

But the examples in favour keep coming faster than the exceptions:

FENster - window
AUto - car
NOEtig - necessary
WICHtig - important
MITtag- afternoon
SONne - sun
REGelmaessig - regular and regularly (see point 2 below)
LANGweilig - boring

Which is what this exercise is in danger of becoming if I don't move on now.

2. Many adjectives can also be used as adverbs without changing a letter.

langsam - 'slow' and also 'slowly'
kurz - 'short,' 'brief' and also 'shortly'
gross - 'big,' 'large,' 'great' and also 'greatly'
ernst - 'serious' and also 'seriously'
einfach - 'simple' and also 'simply'
gleich - 'same' or 'equal' and also 'equally'

What changes is the constructions around these words. For example, 'kurz' only means 'shortly' when paired with another word such as 'darauf,' as in 'kurz darauf,' or 'shortly thereafter.'

Then again, this is hardly peculiar to German as we can also play this game in English:

frueh - early, both adjective (early morning) and adverb (he arrived early)

But I can't think of another beyond 'early.' Can you?

3. Verbs are a mess

In English, we have pretty much two main kinds of verbs: regular and irregular. The same holds true for German, but there are a few other very common forms with which the non-native speaker must grapple, often from one sentence to the next.

Reflexive verbs: These take the action of the verb and throw it back in the lap of the speaker, sometimes literally. For example, one does not sit down. One sits one's self down:

Ich setze mich hin.

One does not fall in love with someone. One falls one's self in love in him:

Ich verliebe mich in ihn.

And, perhaps most bizarrely, one doesn't look forward to something. One pleases one's self on something (for example, a wedding), and that something must be presented at last in the accusative case:

Ich freue mich auf ihre Hochzeit.

Separable verbs: These gems are a real nightmare. Simply put, when using these in a present-tense sentence, the front bit of the verb snaps off and runs to the end, just before the closing punctuation.

For example, 'aufstehen,' 'to stand up' or 'to get up (from bed).' If you want to say 'I get up at 8:00,' you have to say

Ich stehe um 8 Uhr auf.

There seems to be hundreds of these verbs, starting with 'auf,' 'aus,' 'zu,' 'unter,' 'mit' and any other number of (especially) prepositions. I close separable verbs with the most appropos example:

Ich gebe auf.

I give up.

Fine, you may say, because we do something similar in English, as just shown, but we don't have as a formal verb infinitive 'upgive.' But then, English developed a somewhat diminished propensity for stringing smaller words together into larger ones.

And the rest: There are a few other types of verbs that I won't get into, frankly because I still don't understand how they work, such as the 'zu + Infinitiv' verbs. But I can't close this verb chat without pointing out what I think is a simple truth of good old German irregular verbs in general: there is nothing general about them, except that they are generally highly irregular.

Yes, we have our 'funny' verbs in English. We 'take' something, but after the fact we've either 'taken' it, or we 'took' it. 'To be' is always a nutcase of a verb, as is 'to go,' with its 'wents' and 'have gones.'

But in German, the trouble often follows you through the tenses with even the most innocuous-sounding verbs, starting with the present:

lesen (to read)
ich lese
du liest
er liest
wir lesen
ihr lest
sie lesen

All over the shop, as is 'geben,' 'to give':

ich gebe
du gibst
er gibt
wir geben
ihr gebt
sie geben

There's a great tendency for things to fall apart somewhere around the second- and third-person singular, even in the most common verbs. All you can do is keep using them until they make some kind of sense. This doesn't happen with many of these verbs in a month of half-immersion, however.

If the present tense is a head-scratcher, just look at how things go to hell when the beleaguered past tense is dragged into it:

bleiben (to stay, to remain)
ich blieb
du bliebst
er blieb
wir blieben
ihr bliebt
sie blieben

I'm sorry, but this is just a load of gratuitous vowel-swapping of the most cynical sort. I like 'I stay,' and I love 'I stayed.' But I would grow very uncomfortable, very quickly, if I had to run around slurring like a Scotsman, saying 'I styaed' every time I recounted a holiday tale.

Someone make it stop.

But it doesn't. The twists and turns keep coming and coming: Dragging present participles to the ends of sentences, only to have to leave them there to compete with splintery little bits of separable verbs, depending on which part of which phrase they live in. Swapping 'have' or 'has' as the helper verb in intransitive present participles with 'am' or 'is,' as in 'Ich bin gegangen.' (Literally, 'I am gone,' not 'I have gone,' although the latter translation is the correct one.). Lining up and intertwining complex clauses that ignite train wrecks of pieces of verbs, irregular past tense constructions and stacks of very, very lost prepositions at their congested ends.

And that's just verbs.

4. The case of the abominable cases.

I'm not going to dwell on this. I'm just going to leap to the summary: There are too many cases in German. Couple this with the fact that there are three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and as many definite AND indefinite articles for each, and you've got the makings of a terminal migraine.

I want to take this opportunity to draft a simple love note to the person who so very wisely condensed the indefinite article in English (and, as I understand from a poker game earlier in the week, Finnish) to one, beautiful word - a letter, in fact, the first in the alphabet, unless of course it precedes a word starting with a vowel, in which case we lovingly tack an 'n' on it to make it easy to pronounce. Here's to the progenitor of the word 'a.' I love you, sir, madam or what were you.

Here are just a few ways one can, and must, use the indefinite article in German:

ein
eine
einer
einen
einem
eines

These all mean, very simply, 'a.' As in 'a table,' 'a cat,' 'a house.'

And the definite article, in English our happy 'the,' takes on even more forms:

der
die
das
dem
den
des
derren
dessen

and a few more I can't remember, all meaning exactly 'the.'

Forgetting that a table is masculine (der Tisch), a cat is feminine (die Katze), and a house without gender (das Haus), all three articles change depending on which case they are used in a sentence; e.g., nominative, accusative, dative or genitive (used to show ownership and pretty much gone from common usage, thank GOD!).

5. In order to pronounce some words correctly, one would require glottal surgery.

I've eaten several poppy seed rolls for breakfast in Berlin. The word for these tasty bits of bread is 'Mohnbroetchen.' I have tried and I have tried, but to get the word to come out, I have to stand on my head, hold my left nostril shut, round my lips and exhale through a vuvuzela.

The other word I can't get out without trauma is 'furchtbar,' which means 'horrible' or 'frightfully.' (Another adjective/adverb pair word.) It should be easier than it is, but I've found myself lying in bed repeating the word aloud over and over again, trying to make it sound in the air as it does in my head. Unfortunately, it just sounds furchtbar.

6. Conclusion

I love English. I love its simplicity of article, its disregard for case complexity, its easy verbs and lower-case nouns.

But I also love this crazy Teutonic language with which I've become surrounded. And I intend to continue to become further reacquainted with it in isolation at my desk in London.

So if you hear a vuvuzela honking after the closing ceremonies of the World Cup, it's just me trying to order some bread rolls. Ich lerne noch Deutsch.

Amerikaner in Berlin - Part II: Toilet training

I probably shouldn't mention this, but, during World War II, folklore has it that allied soldiers excused themselves to use the toilet by announcing to their comrades in arms that they were "going to call Hitler."

If the state of German toilets in the 1940s was any indication of the cruelty the average citizen endured for the crime of attempting a good Scheisse - never mind speaking out against the Nazis - then the proverbial saying probably understated their discomfort.

I know not what bygone - and no doubt sadistic - regime was in power when the toilet in my Charlottenburg apartment was cracked free from its hellish mould, but I pray that, like a house in Bradford or Felixstowe featured in 'Homes Under the Hammer,' it innocently suffers from a long overdue update.

The first time I engaged the loo in a sitting position, I was aware of an olfactory disturbance more intense than I've experienced on my own behalf since my mother opened my soiled nappy. Now, let's call it what it is: it's shit. And, yes, it stinks. But clearly, either I had eaten and just passed a skunk steak, or some other demonic force was at work.

It was only when I stood up and the gag reflex triggered that I discovered the root of the problem: my toilet, or 'faecal garotte,' as I prefer to think back on it, was constructed in such a way that whatever came out of one landed - or, more at it, perched itself - on something akin to a hamster-sized wading pool that contained, in its slight concavity, about 200ml of water. And a whole lot of stuff I don't need to tell you about - there in plain view, nearer to anyone, especially me, than even Satan could have intended.

I covered my mouth and nose and backed away in utter disgust. There, in this cruelly constructed little shit ventricle, was half a day's worth of my own, I shall euphemise, detritus, staring up at me and affording me a view of 'what comes naturally' such as I've never been forced to endure.

Who, I asked myself, fanning the bathroom door post-flush, could have thought up a design so...personally revealing, and simultaneously offensive? Isn't it a fact of our existence that some mirrors are simply too disturbing to be gazed into? And what could be gained from this information? Did Germans back in whatever day it was this insane contraption was conceived routinely inspect their own - and perhaps others' - faeces? And for what purposes? Medical? Purely scientific? Shits and giggles (see what I did there?)?

And, more importantly, if I am to LIVE with this choking-stench machine from hell for two weeks, how on earth can I spare myself its inherent sadism?

Of course I learned to reach around after the first 'kaboom' and trip the flush, which ran like Niagara through the poo trough, over a small porcelain lip (I shuddered each time to think how near it must have come to my bits on the way) and down a rather standard-looking toilet drain, which would have better served humanity had it been placed where it should have been: in the bloody centre of the bowl, under the bum.

My employer has mercifully relocated me to a very modern apartment in a high building in what resembles a somewhat Communist rendition of London's Barbican Centre. The loo is rectangular, which I don't mind at all, and looks and works like every other toilet I've ever seen in my life - from greasy American truck stop to dive pub in Scotland.

Each time I use it, and allow the Ikea seat and lid to gently return themselves to a closed position with a satisfying 'bump', I smile just a little, exhale and say a prayer to the plumbing gods, whose much under-appreciated modern works I shall never again take for granted.