Alles Klar
by Anna Merlan
At the start of the pandemic I began learning German so I could communicate and get around better when I visit friends in Berlin. This is a bit like getting a scuba diving license in order to better enjoy the local pool. People in Berlin very often speak flawless English, ornamented with clever little rhetorical flourishes about how their English isn’t very good. (I might suspect them of being insincere or unserious but, if there’s one thing to be said for the Germans I’ve met, it’s not that.)
My study plan consisted exclusively of Duolingo, German TV (I’m obsessed with a show called Kleo, about a former Stasi assassin going on a very funny and conveniently multilingual killing spree for two seasons and counting), and by very occasionally opening 501 German Verbs. Having learned to speak Spanish with a million years of schooling, writing papers, talking a lot, and struggling through magic realism and Don Quixote, I’ve had no illusions that I’m actually “learning German” in any way that really counts.
If I’d planned to move to Germany—or really do anything other than visit my weird art friends every few years—learning German would have made more sense. The pointlessness was attractive in itself, though, the extremely low stakes of wanting to feel just slightly more confident in a city that doesn’t much care either way. Nonetheless, the years went on, and I tended to my pandemic sourdough starter (also still alive!), rehearsed my own clever little phrases, and tried to understand the extremely annoying and ungraceful mysteries of German grammar and vocabulary. (The verb goes at the end of a sentence, meaning you often cannot even begin to understand what anyone is trying to say until they’ve reached their conclusion, and damn near everything is a ridiculous compound word; the word for gloves for instance, is Handschuhe, meaning, literally, “hand shoes.”)
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