German

Okay, here's the promised post on the German language. (But first, I have to tell you that Lindsey started talking about a "tomahto" yesterday rather than a "tomayto." Those European types at the international school are really starting to get to her. Sheesh. Next thing you know, she'll start thinking that it would be a good thing for people to have health coverage.)

Now, before you start thinking that German doesn't make sense compared to English, take a second and explain to me why "tough," "though," and "through" don't rhyme.

On with the show. German has some interesting challenges. There are five different ways to say "the." There are four different ways to say "a" or "an." Which version you use depends on the noun that follows it and whether the noun is the subject, the direct object, or the indirect object. I rarely get them right when I'm speaking.

One of the other challenges with German is the word order. All but one of the verbs get shoved to the end. In English, I would say, "I can see Tanner." In German, that translates to, "Ich kann Tanner sehen." Translated word for word, that comes out to, "I can Tanner see."

Past tense also gets a little funky. They don't say, "I drove to Steinhausen." They say "I am to Steinhausen driven," or "Ich bin nach Steinhausen gefahren." They say, "I have bread eaten," or "Ich habe Brot gegessen," rather than "I ate bread." (They capitalize all nouns.) This is all just fine in the classroom, but when you try to have a conversation with someone, it's hard to get it all right on the fly. You just have to practice, which is not easy when I work in an English-speaking office and live with an English-speaking family. I do just fine in stores as long as the cashier sticks to the dialogue that's running in my head, but when they go off script, like asking me if I'd like a piece of twine strung through the handle of the bag so that I can carry it more easily (which happened yesterday), I have to retreat and go to my most-used German line, "Ummmmmmm, sprechen Sie Englisch?"

Pronunciation is also tricky. German doesn't have a "th" sound, so they can't pronounce "Ethan." It comes out as "aytan." "Wood" comes out as "voot." (In German, the letter "w" is pronoucned like our letter "v," and the letter "v" is pronounced like our letter "f." A "VW" is a "fow vay.")

And then, finally, there's the fact that in Switzerland, they speak a very different version of German. I can follow a good chunk of a conversation in high German, but I'm almost totally lost in Swiss German. They tend to drop the endings of a lot of words and lose a lot of the consonants. The German word for "no," which is "nein," becomes "nei" in Swiss German.