German (not-so) Quickly

A couple weekends ago, bored late in the day Saturday, I happened to flip to one of those PBS travel programs. It was on Germany (Bavaria, specifically - they were in Rothenburg). I watched the show with some interest, and afterward, said to myself, "I should pull out that book on learning German I bought a couple of years back and try to re-teach myself some over the summer."

(Not that I ever PLAN to go to Germany. I think at this point the only way I'd ever set foot in Europe would be after a Grand Tour-style steamship trip. The thought of 12 hours or whatever it is on a plane makes me twitch)

The main reason I want to learn it, is like the old joke about climbing Everest: because it's there. And because I can. (And, I suppose, on some level, exercising the little grey cells is good for me. But that's secondary). And mainly, because learning stuff is fun.*

So I pulled the book out and started flipping through it again. I mainly look at it now while I'm eating - normally I read something during that time (a magazine, or a cookbook, or something. I know, the anti-multitasking, be-in-the-moment-ALWAYS people would hate that, and probably some of the healthists would hate it too, seeing as I'm not observing every lettuce leaf or bit of cracker that goes in my mouth...but)

So, I'm literally re-learning German in bite-sized pieces.

I'm not very far yet - I'm still hung up on the whole cases-of-nouns thing. In English, we don't have different definite articles depending on what role a word is playing in a sentences (and as far as I can remember, neither does French - though French also has genders for things that aren't alive, which is something that's still odd to me, as a primarily-Anglophone person. And why is a spoon feminine in French and masculine in German. I find that kind of lack-of-standardization mildly irritating, just as I find the tendency for different plants to go by the same common name in different parts of the country, or for one plant species to have several common names, irritating. [which may be partly why I remember the scientific names usually before I remember the common ones, when someone asks me, "what's this plant?"]).

Of course, German HAS to have that, because it has a more flexible word order than English. (It's perfectly normal, for example, to put the direct object at the start of a sentence in German. I think that would be fairly rare in standard English)

So, I'm slowly trying to memorize the der-die-das, der-die-die, des-(ummm....die?) articles, and reminding myself of what an accusative and what a dative case are. (I think one thing about learning a new language - your "home" language, you take all of the stuff for granted; I don't think about "I'm putting an indirect object here, and then comes the direct object" when I speak or write. But in German I have to stop and think when I'm looking at a sentence and figure out what each part is doing. (An example: "Den Wolf toten die Bauern" which LOOKS like Wolf is the subject but it is not; the Den tells you it is the direct object, so it is translated as "The farmers kill the wolf," and not the other way around. Of course, some sentences are fairly obvious: Das Brot isst das Kind (I can't do the double-S in German on my keyboard) would have to be "The child eats the bread" and not the other way 'round. Well, not in any NORMAL circumstances).

(And again, I sort of regret that we were never taught much sentence-diagramming in school. Or at least, I wasn't. I know I was in the "Gold" group or the "Superstars" or whatever they called the top reading or English groups - yes, this was back in the day when kids were still "tracked" in school - and so the teacher's assumption was "You already understand the mechanics of how this works so I'm not going to go into the detail." Now I kind of wish they had.)

I admit, I also kind of chuckle at the Rosetta Stone ads (though I might still consider buying their German package, as an adjunct to the books I'm working from) where they say "No tedious memorization or learning grammar" because it's actually the stuff that other people might find tedious that interests me - I want to know how it WORKS, even down to the last darn definite article.

Though I will admit to groaning a bit when I got to the next chapter and saw that adjectives also have to agree with the gender and (apparently) case of the noun. Wow, that's really different from English. (Also: "strong" versus "weak" endings on adjectives)


(*It makes me sad that there seem to be a lot of people who either don't believe this, or who don't find learning stuff fun. Being able to learn new stuff is satisfying and diverting and sometimes, even, as T.H. White said in one of his books, a cure for when you're sad)