Fun with German, Part 2

I figured it would be smart to split this post in two lest I unintentionally inflict or sustain any Repetitive Nerd Injuries by doing it all in one go. Here’s part two.

I mentioned in my previous post how you can find links between English and German all the time without even trying. I just noticed another one as I was typing the last paragraph. The Sound of Music was playing over my headphones and this lyric suddenly caught my attention:

Timid and shy and scared are you
Of things beyond your ken

I’ve never seen or used the word “ken” outside Sixteen Going on Seventeen, but I’ve known this song as long as I can remember, so I’ve always instinctively known what the word means. And just now, my brain did this: ken ---> kennen, the German word for “to be familiar with”. The world makes sense all of a sudden! Learning German as an English-speaker is like meeting your friend’s parents and suddenly seeing where all their quirks came from.

I guess it wasn’t too surprising to find all these links between English and German, but what did surprise me was how many links I found between Indonesian and German. That I wasn’t expecting. Indonesian is a real melting-pot of a language, a tasty sambal of Malay, Javanese, Sanskrit, Arabic and Dutch. As a schoolkid learning Indo, I immediately noticed all the Sanskrit influences, because I speak Konkani (sabun=soap, manusia=humanity, kursi=chair, perpustakaan=library…). Only when I moved here – actually, it was when I visited Amsterdam – did I start to realise just how many words Bahasa Indonesia has retained from Dutch colonial times. I don’t know Dutch, but it’s close enough to German that I recognised these:

• Kammer –> kamar = room
• Rauchen –> rokok = to smoke
• Rechnung –> rekening = bill/receipt
• Tasche –> tas = bag
• Rock –> rok – skirt
• Tante/Oma/Opa – aunt/grandma/grandpa

COOL!!!

Yes, I too wonder frequently how I manage to stand up straight with all this totally useless knowledge sloshing around my brain.

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I will leave you with my five favourite German words.

1. Ohrwurm – This word is brilliant – there’s no one-word equivalent in English. It means “the song that’s stuck in your head”, but if you break up the parts literally it means “ear-worm”. Cute!
2. Aufgepimpt – Classic Denglish. It’s the German word for “pimped out”.
3. Vorkuhila – This is the German word for “mullet”. What’s quintessentially German about this word (apart from the fact that there seem to be a lot of people with mullets in Germany) is that it’s a contraction of “vor kurz, hinter lang” (short in the front, long in the back), which is an exact description of what the hairstyle is. This language does not mess around.
4. Klugscheisser – The one reason I like this word is that it’s the only insult I know in German. The literal meaning is “clever shit”. Basically you’re calling someone a smartass.
5. Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz – As I mentioned earlier, Germans like to put lots of small words to make a bigger word with a very exact meaning. That’s great, but sometimes the poor dears just don’t know when to stop. This monstrosity means “Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law”, and is actually the name of a real piece of parliamentary legislation passed in the German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania ten years ago. In case it’s too much of a mouthful for you, you can always refer to it by its abbreviation: RkReÜAÜG. Oh, those goofy Germans.

Fun with German, Part 1

I’ve always loved languages – I think that’s probably part of the reason I ended up writing code for a living. So one of the real joys of living in Germany for me has been learning German.

Deutsch is the fifth language I’ve tried to formally learn, but up to this point, learning languages had always been a completely theoretical exercise for me. Although I studied Indonesian for seven years at school, each planned class trip got cancelled due to the political upheaval in the ‘90s, so I still haven’t been! This is the first time I’ve been able to really immerse myself in a language, and that’s made it all the more satisfying.

I’ll never forget how much fun I had on my first trip to the supermarket in Germany. It was like jumping into a virtual reality computer game version of my German textbook. And reading your washing machine manual is so much more interesting when you have to figure out what a wasserhahn (literally, “water chicken”) could possibly be.

To me, Deutsch feels intuitive and nice in a lot of ways, and frustrating and weird in others. For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a completely and unashamedly nerdy post comparing German to all the other languages I’ve learned. So here goes.

Danger: Grammar geek-out ahead. Syntactophobes, beware.

German nouns have case, which doesn’t feel unnatural to me after studying classical languages. When you’ve had to memorise the twenty-four forms of each noun in Sanskrit (eight cases, plus  three numbers – singular, dual and plural), German’s four cases and two numbers feel pretty manageable. A lot of it is just recognising and repeating patterns, and absorbing the exceptions as you go along.

Gender is another fun adventure in Deutsch. In languages that have gender, once you move beyond the realm of people (boy, girl, man, woman), the assignment of gender to nouns is pretty much completely arbitrary. Some languages make it easier than others. In Latin, for example, you can tell the gender of most nouns from their ending  (there are certain suffixes like –a or –as that are always feminine, and others that are always masculine or neuter).

In German on the other hand, aside from a few benevolent exceptions (thanks, –ung!), there’s zero way to tell. The word for “door” is feminine (die Tür), but the word for “gate” is neuter (das Tor). (Oh, and just to make it trickier, the word for “girl”, mädchen, is neuter.)

There’s no particular logic involved, you just have to know your der/die/das. At first the idea of having to memorise the arbitrary genders of hundreds of nouns made me wonder if I should just throw in the towel and buy one of those lame electronic translators. But then I remembered that nouns in my mother tongue, Konkani, also have gender, and I use them without even thinking. So it’s just a matter of time before I get there with German… right? (I hope so, anyway.)

No, the thing I really wonder if I’ll ever be able to get my head around in Deutsch is the evil, evil phenomenon known as the separable-prefix verb. I swear these guys are the sneakiest SOBs I have ever met.

In English, we also have the concept of adding a prefix to a verb and totally changing what it means. For example, “to pose” has quite a different meaning to “to compose”. Similarly, you can add a prefix to a German verb, for example “hören” (to listen/hear) can become “aufhören” (to stop/quit).

Quite straightforward, you would think. Just a simple matter of vocabulary expansion, right? But the plot thickens when you find out that for many prefixed verbs in German, the prefix acts like a sulky toddler and always trails back at the end of the sentence.

Example: Ich höre mit dem Rauchen auf = I’m quitting smoking.

Basically, it’s not enough to know what aufhören means. When someone says a sentence like this, you have to follow along the entire sentence, and then they say one word at the end that just changes the meaning of the verb and causes you to have to go reparse the entire sentence in your mind. It can be really confusing. I wonder how many busking backpackers have travelled through Germany and thought someone was telling their friends to listen their the music, when they were actually saying “quit it with that music!”

I have to say, though, that on the whole, being a native speaker of English is quite a boon when you’re learning German. English is a Germanic language, so there are literally hundreds of words that are instantly recognisable – I/Ich, shoe/Schuh, house/Haus, chair/Stuhl, meat/Fleisch, better/besser… the list goes on. It means you can understand a lot of words by context and instinct that you may not have picked up on otherwise.

Since starting to learn German, I’ve noticed little things in English that surely must be a result of their common roots. Like the fact that back in the day when people used “thou” (which sounds quite similar to “du”, by the way), they would say “thou seekest the truth” or “hast thou forsaken me?” In German, the verb will almost always end in “-st” when the subject is “du”.

Of course, English has simplified a lot over the years and moved further and further away from German. We don’t say “willst thou order the Baconator or the Double Junior Cheeseburger Deluxe?” anymore. (Actually, I may be the first person to have ever uttered that exact sentence.) But these days the two languages are slowly starting to meet in the middle again – this time, with German absorbing more and more English. The word for mobile phone in German is Handy. At work, everyone refers to the overhead projector as the “beamer”. I’ve seen ads in the subway advertising deals for “Internet Surfen”. You really cannot escape Denglish living in a big city here.

I’m sure there are a lot of purists out there upset at this bastardisation of the language of Goethe and Kafka. I guess they can only rest assured (or not) that there’s always the option of relaxing their troubles away at the nearest Wellnesshotel (spa).

Eines kleines Wortspiel

Slowly but surely, I am feeling like less and less of an idiot when it comes to German. That is, I am only stumped 60% of the time now instead of 90% :]

Last week, a cool milestone: I understood a pun! (Yes, contrary to popular belief there is such a thing as German humour.)

Over Advent, the bakery chain Rischart put up this billboard in Munich’s U-Bahn stations to advertise their seasonal wares. The caption means “Rischart has a Plätzchen for everyone.”



The wordplay: “plätzchen”, which literally means “little place”, is also the name for the tiny cookies that Germans bake and eat over the Christmas season (see the billboard picture… mmmmmm).

Learning the language and culture through immersion has been so slow and gradual, it’s nice to have a concrete reminder once in a while that I am actually progressing. One small word for a German, one giant leap in my confidence that my Deutsch isn't completely shite.

Btw, because I’m a nerd, afterwards I went online looking for English-German bilingual puns. My favourite one was “that’s just the tip of the Scheissberg”. (In German Scheisse = shit, Berg = mountain.) I’m so stealing it!

How to type umlauts without going bonkers

Here is a rare beast, a geeky post from me.

Since I started to learn German, I have been frustrated by the fact that the standard US region installation of Windows doesn’t do umlauts very well. I knew of 3 options, all equally infuriating:

• Learn the Windows Alt codes for ö, ä and ü (Alt+0228, Alt+0246, Alt+0252). Would take me months to do without a cheat sheet, there has to be a better way.
• Use the MS Word-specific shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+: then the character). This means you have to open Word or Outlook whenever you want to type an umlauted character. Urgh.
• Switch to European keyboard layout (where many of the letters are in different places to optimise for Euro languages, eg. Z and Y are switched). The loss of efficiency is just not worth it for the number of German words that I actually need to type.

Courtesy of Ravi, here is a better way.

1. Go to Control Panel > Regional Settings > Keyboard Language (UI labels will vary based on your version of Windows)
2. Change your Keyboard Language to US-International
3. You now have easy (if not super-intuitive) keyboard shortcuts to add umlauts:
• For ä: Right-Alt + q
• For ü: Right-Alt + t
• For ö: Right-Alt + p
4. All your other keys still work exactly the same way.

Huzzah! Insanity averted!

Edit: Some more handy hints - For the Esszett character (ß) the shortcut is Right-Alt + s. For the Euro currency symbol (€) the shortcut is Right-Alt + 5.

Linguistic constipation

As I mentioned earlier, I am doing quite well with reading things in Deutsch. But I am completely freezing up when anyone German actually talks to me. It’s really quite sad.

The following has happened to me about four times so far:

German salesperson (talking fast and with  Bayern accent markedly different to my textbook companion CD): Hello. Kann ich Ihnen hilfen? [“Can I help you?” This is the opening line to just about every practice shopping conversation I did in German class. But for whatever reason, my brain can’t crunch the words fast enough to answer in a non-stupid amount of time.]
Urmila: *conveniently blanks out on everything in the universe, eventually develops a sort of demented grin*
GS: *looks sympathetic* Er… English?
Urmila: *panics* Uh, yep. English :(
GS: Okay, gut. How can I help you today ma’am?
Urmila: Uh, so how much per hour for the wireless internet? *holds hands behind back so as not to bash idiot self over head*

And then, having exposed yourself as a monolingual imbecile, you just don’t feel like you can go back.

Update: I did manage to get the situation somewhat under control on my last conversation. When I went to buy my prepaid German SIM card, I spent 30 seconds repeating the phrase “langsamer, bitte” (slower, please) to myself beforehand so I wouldn’t forget, and successfully asked the guy, in a timely and dignified fashion, to slow down. He was a really good sport about it, and talked to me at the speed you would dictate to your great-grandmother if she were typing in Vi. That actually really helped. On the down side, I accidentally put the SIM card in my bag when what he’d really asked me to do was to scan the barcode. But I guess it’s a start.

Geoff, my German teacher in Seattle, promised me that I’d spend at least the first month feeling like a complete noodle every time I tried to speak to a German person. I guess he was right.

The difference between speaking Deutsch in a classroom and speaking Deutsch in Germany is kind of like the difference between doing pull ups at the gym, and having to climbing a tall tree to escape a man-eating lion. The situation is just a thousand times more unpredictable. Also, your ego ends up in about the same shape as your dangling feet after the lion has had at them for a while.

I leave you with the sign outside an Indian restaurant I walked past on my wanderings. Lots of fun new vocab here. I assume “Holzkohle-Lehmofen” means clay oven?

Fliegen, lesen und einkaufen

I’m writing this entry safe and sound from my little hotel room in Munich! I spent most of my flight reading, rotating between fiction (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), non-fiction (Deutsch Na Klar, my German textbook) and bizarre fantasy (the ever-amusing Skymall catalogue, which in its latest incarnation is flogging such essentials as a voice-recording pen, a snorkel with built-in underwater digital camera, and a square of Astroturf on which small dogs are supposed to relieve themselves indoors).

I didn’t get as much sleep as I hoped, and my flight arrived in the morning, which means I’m probably going to be a zombie by 7pm or earlier.

I was lucky enough to have a window seat and land in Munich on a clear and gorgeous summer’s day. Since I was arriving from Amsterdam and the airport is to the north of Munich, I didn’t get to see the city from the air. Rather, the view when we were landing was of endless green pastures dotted with little white houses with bright red roofs. It was all very classical European farm scenery, and it reminded me of the illustrations in a book my parents used to read to me when I was little called “Flying is Fun”. The airport is definitely out in the boonies, but what boonies they be.

I managed to find my way to the train station, use the ticket machine and get to my hotel in the city without too much trouble. It’s a great feeling to be able to use the German I learnt from a textbook for something real. I didn’t think I’d know enough to get by, but I was able to read pretty much all the signs and advertisements on the journey from the airport to Munich Hauptbahnhof. Fun fact: the Diet Coke slogan here is “Nur du bist du” - “Only you are you”.

After freshening up I went to stretch my legs on the nearby streets. For some reason I’d been intensely craving three bean salad for the entire plane trip, so I decided to find a supermarket and make that happen. That first grocery trip was a pretty awesome experience. It was like someone turned Chapter 5 of my German textbook into a virtual reality computer game. Purely because I am way too fascinated by foreign languages, here is what I bought from the store:

• Gröne Bohnen – green beans
• Weiβe Bohnen – white beans
• Petersilie – parsley
• Eine Zwiebel – one onion
• Weiβwein Essig – white wine vinegar
• Olivenöl – olive oil
• Vollkorn Spaghetti – whole wheat spaghetti
• Pasta-Sauce
• Weintrauben – grapes
• Milka Alpenmilch Schokolade – Milka chocolate. Mmmm!

Then I got to have a whole conversation with the cashier, who stressed out because all I had was a €50 note and she didn’t want to give me that many €5 notes as change. Man, it was so great. (Although I don’t think she thought so.)

A trip to the grocery store in your native language could surely never be this fun :)