Immersion

Sorry, folks, for leaving the last posting on a cliffhanger. And thanks for all the emails! It was lovely to hear from you.

I´ve got very limited time...I´m supposed to be revising the Nebensatz and participle phrases and other horrid things that you don´t want to know about...so I´m skipping ahead with the story.

There are so many things about my last five weeks in Germany that I want to write about, beginning with my bewildered response to the engineering here...where even opening a window began as a cultural challenge.

Or the overall societal angst about recycling, which really is a much trickier business than in Australia, and certainly Vietnam. Not to mention the ubiquitous Pfand, the deposit you give over for a plate or cup or almost always a drink bottle.

As for obeying traffic lights, you can actually get fined for jaywalking in this country, and littering, or posting rubbish in a random skip is verboten. These were some of the things that overwhelmed me when I first arrived in Berlin, along with the kindness of strangers and the observance of queue etiquette.

Not to mention the language. After an uncomfortable flight from Bangkok, I had a stopover in Frankfurt and was thrilled to find that I could understand all the airport announcements. I never managed that in Vietnamese. But I think that was a little "freebie" to show me a possible future, if I made the effort. As I settled into Berlin, and profound culture shock, I was disappointed at the slowness with which I was embracing German. I surprised my host in Berlin, Constantin, with my reluctance to speak, my shyness...as well as myself. Yet gradually, the quietitude of Germany became familiar, and I became a little bolder.

After two weeks, I left Berlin for Saarbrücken, in central southern Germany, which is where my immersion in the language also began.

When I arrived at Sabine´s house in rural Alsting, near Saarbrücken, I knew this was going to be a very different experience from Berlin. Sabine is very extroverted, so I went from just hanging with Constantin or wandering around museums to living in a "drop in" centre. Guests over for breakfast, a bottomless pot of coffee, candles burning on the table, the stereo churning out Buddha Bar 24/7...and progressing through to the night with wine, wine and more wine...it was kind of amazing, but really overwhelming. Just about everything was in German, a lot of it dialect. Talking in German seemed to require about three times as much energy as talking in English for me, and I wasn´t advanced enough to be a very interesting conversationalist. All I did was learn German, speak German, sit around while other people spoke German, and then be alone with my thoughts...in English.

But I´ve been overwhelmed for most of the time since I left Australia, kind of like the character Paul Giamatti plays in the film Duets. He tells his disinterested wife that he´s going out for a packet of cigarettes, and meets a woman in a karaoke bar who gives him a bottle of beta blockers. After just one tablet, he´s forgotten all his fears and is up there singing. He then wins the competition and goes on this momentous road trip...cigarettes all forgotten.

So, basically, I´m on beta blockers. There are no more "shoulds", not too many anyway.

Back in Alsting, Sabine suggested that I take the next month-long intensive German course at her university. That was three weeks ago. I began revising immediately and now I´ve been attending the course for 9 days. I can´t begin to describe how incredible it is. I have surpassed my wildest expectations, and I had aimed very high.



As I have only had 8 weeks of formal study since school (where I had little interest), and merely learned German phrases from friends, my standards are all over the place. While conversation, understanding and phonetics are my strengths, I need to build up my vocabulary and my grammar is very poor. Because of that, I was placed in the upper level basic class. But this week they moved me up two classes! OH MY GOD! Upper level intermediate sentence construction is achingly difficult, particularly when you never cared to learn German grammar until a week ago.

But I don´t know if I´ve been ever so hungry for anything, so I´m actually falling on the rules with delight...I´ve been "faking it" with grammar for ages, and I´m exhausted. While German, like Germany, is blessedly logical. And in one month, I´ve progressed from being afraid to speak to supermarket checkout operators, to understanding a film without English subtitles, to making friends without speaking English, to writing and translating poetry, to translating between German and English - lots of people at university can only speak one of them, to using the present perfect and genitive correctly in conversation, to writing my first error-free email, to...and even then I´m horribly, desperately far away from being fluent.

However I have achieved the first of my goals with the language: to be able to learn from talking with people. I´m so comfortable now with German that I don´t even notice I´m speaking it...right up until that moment not so long into the conversation when I can´t find the word.