LEARNING new languages heralds new vistas of knowledge and understanding. Some people learn them for fun, some have interest, some just like to show off and some just have no choice otherwise. When I started learning German, I had two reasons: interest and necessity. One would ask, why German? People in our country, when they do learn, opt for languages such as French, which sounds so ‘sophisticated’. German is not, so to say, a beautiful language and it even sounds harsh at times. But when you have to pack up and go to Germany for a long stay, you don’t have much choice. On top of that, people kept telling me things like “you cannot survive even for a minute on English”, “Germans are very particular about their language”, “they refuse to speak and understand you if you talk to them in English”, etc.
So, with only a month to introduce myself to this new language, I started a self-taught course. During this time, I found out a few interesting things about German, indicating that it might not be very difficult to learn.
* If you can make all sounds in the Urdu alphabet correctly, you can form all German sounds too, with few exceptions like ‘ch’, ‘’ and ‘#’. The only strange-looking German letter is a (called ess-set), but it simply has an ‘s’ sound.
* Unlike English, where a single letter or a combination of letters can have different pronunciation in different words, like ‘u’ in ‘put’ and ‘but’ or ‘eight’ in ‘height’ and ‘eight’, German letters have only one pronunciation. So no matter how strange it may seem for a person familiar with English, the letter ‘u’ will always have an ‘oo’ (as in ‘fool’ or ‘foot’) sound. If you read out a word with the knowledge of these rules, there is a 90 per cent chance that you will do it right.
* They speak what they write, no silent letters. So, for ‘Pfeffer, or ‘Knie’, you have to say the ‘p’ and the ‘k’.
* All nouns have initial capital, whether they are common nouns or proper nouns, at the beginning or in middle of a sentence. A sentence like ‘Ich babe einen Apfel’ (I have an apple) or ‘Ich bin eine Studentin’ (I am a student) doesn’t imply any special apple or a special student.
These were a few easier aspects of the language. But for a beginner, the long German words, the three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and a huge list of grammar rules is overwhelming. But I didn’t bother about it. All I was interested in learning were numbers, days of the week, months, time and important directions such as ‘Eingang’, ‘Ausgang’, ‘Links’, ‘Rechts’ (entrance, exit, left, right). I got hold of a German learning kit with a book and four audio cassettes. After a month of going around with a walkman and the book, and talking to myself in German, I was able to count from 1 to 20, form larger numbers, memorize important words and phrases and understand some simple German when spoken very distinctly.
Accompanied with the limited knowledge of German and an unlimited amount of nervousness instilled by people who seem to know more about Germany than Pakistan, I finally arrived at Frankfurt International Airport. Till the airport, my lack of German didn’t pose any difficulty and my nervousness was somewhat abated. But by the time I took the train to Saarbr#cken, a city 200kms South-west of Frankfurt on the French border and my actual destination, I realized my handicap.
Saarbr#ucken is a university town with a population of less than 200,000. It has been a French city and a German city at different times, till 1959, when it was finally integrated into the Federal Republic of Germany. The French and German influence affected the German spoken there, which is called Schweizerdeutsch. The standard German is called Hoch Deutsch and it is spoken only in Hannover. The rest of the country has some variations. Of course, every language varies slightly from one area to another. But when people of Saarbru#cken speak German, newcomers like me would just think, ‘Is that German?” Just to give you an example, ‘ch’ is always pronounced as ‘sh’ and ‘g’ at the end of a word is pronounced as ‘zh’. Being a small city, everything is written and spoken in German, and in some areas in French, but definitely not English. And yes, people do refuse to understand any other language! Only in big departmental stores do they also understand French.
Once installed in the university guest house, the next thing to do was to buy Lebensmittel (groceries) for the wochenende. One of the students helped me in that. She told me that we will be going to ‘Zaabaazaa’ (that’s what it sounded like) and I assumed it to be the name of the supermarket. But when we reached there, it turned out to be ‘Saar Basaar’. I had completely forgotten about the ‘s’ sound in German. That was the first lesson I learned — to remember German pronunciation and put the English pronunciation aside.
In the supermarket, it is very easy to spend the whole day looking for what you want, if you don’t know its German name. Every aisle has boards on both ends listing the things the aisle contains. But if you don’t know about eier, brot, kse or gem#se, you end up walking up and down each aisle. Then, at the counter, when the cashier asks for’, ein-und-zwanzig Mark zwei-und-vierzig, in Schweizerdeutsch (that changes zwei to zero), you are clueless as to what he/she is talking about. All the self-learned lessons become useless when it comes to understanding this German dialect. Now, how would you feel when you are stuck in one room for two days, with only a TV that has some 30-plus channels as a solace? Not so bad, you say. But there is a catch. Except for two of them, the rest of the channels are in German. The programmes are in German or are dubbed in German. Ever imagined watching Tom Hanks speaking German? I can tell you how it feels. It’s strange and funny at the same time. You know how that actor speaks, you know his voice and then you end up ‘hearing’ him speak in an unknown language and in a strange voice. But the two-day weekend lesson was not completely useless. I added new words to my vocabulary, such as ‘Werbung’ (advertisement) and ‘neue Single’, the latter being the most-used word on German MTV, and was able to identify few words in German dialogues such as ‘Entschuldigung’, ‘Wirklich’, ‘Vielleicht’, for which I was quite proud. I also got to know the German titles for Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fr#hst#ck zum Schokolade), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen) and Lord of the Rings (Der Herr der Ringe).
After the weekend isolation, the next few days were very busy. University classes were scheduled for the next week and I had to search for an apartment (look for advertisements in German newspapers), go to the bank and familiarize myself with the city and the bus system.
Travelling by bus is easy if you know the bus number, the direction you need to take and the name of the bus stop. Once, I had to go to a Muslim meat shop and after finding out that bus number 11 and 49 both go there and the stop name is ‘LVA’ (stands for Landesversicherungsanstalt) I took my first bus ride on my own. On every bus, a recording is run, that announces the next bus stop name. If you know your stop, you just have to listen for it and then prepare to get off. But, of course, you should know the correct pronunciation, which I had forgotten, so when the recording announced LVA (read ‘ell flow aa’ and not ‘ell vee ay’), I ignored it. As a result, I missed the stop, had to get off at the next stop and walk all the way back. Lesson number two: remember how letters sound in German.
If you are visiting Germany then whether you are in bus, waiting at the bus stop, in a shop or on the street, your vocabulary is incomplete without these words: Entschuldigung, danke, bitte, wie, guten Morgen or sometimes shortened to just morgen (and in Schweizer Deutsch pronounced mo-yen), guten Tag and Tsehupa, and phrases like ‘Ich weia nicht’ (I don’t know), ‘Ich verstehe nicht’ (I don’t understand), ‘Ich verstehe kein Deutsch’ (I do not understand German), ‘Wie viel kostet er?’ (How much it costs), and most important ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ (Do you speak English?)
Then there are differences of how you greet someone. In English, when you ask ‘how are you?’ you don’t expect an elaborate answer of how that person is feeling. But if you make the mistake of asking ‘Wie geht es Ihnen?’ to a stranger, be prepared for either a surprised stare or a long answer. Asking someone ‘how are you?’ is personal and it means you expect all the details. So better end the greetings with just a Hallo, Guten Morgen or Guten Tag.
German grammar is quite complex. For nouns it has three genders — masculine, feminine and neuter. For example, der Apfel (the apple) is masculine, die Gesundheit (the health) is feminine and das Madchen (the girl) is neuter, where der, die and das are the articles for masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively. For most of the nouns, there are no rules to identify what gender they are. You just have to memorize them. Don’t be fooled by common sense that if the noun is for some female, it will be feminine. It is not necessary. Take the noun Mdchen (girl). It’s not die Mdchen, but das Mdchen.
One has to learn the nouns along with the articles, der, die, des, since they will determine the article, verb and adjective endings. So, if you want a (ein) large (groa) apple (der Apfel), you say: ‘Ich mchte einen groaen. But for a (ein) banana (die Banane), it will be ‘Ich mochte eine groae Banane’.
Another thing to take care of is the two second-person pronouns du and Sie (with capital S) for informal and formal addressing, respectively. You can think of them as ‘tum’ and ‘aap’ in Urdu. But the concept of formal and informal is not the same, and for me it is still not clear. To be on the safe side, I always used Sie for strangers or elders. But I’ve seen students addressing professors with du, which was quite shocking at first.
The fun doesn’t end here. One has to be careful of lots of German words which have ‘false friends’ in English, words which looks similar to English but have completely different meanings. Verb like bekommen (to get) that has nothing to do with English ‘to become’, bed (bath), boot (boat, although it is pronounced same), flur (corridor) to give a few examples.
Speaking German and listening to German for one year was an interesting experience. There were many situations one could only get out of if they knew what to say in the right language. As for survival, it is good to learn the basics of the language. But even if you don’t, you can get around in big cities such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, etc, since they are already full of tourists. It is the smaller places that pose restrictions.
After ‘tuning’ my ears to consider German as a normal language that one should expect to hear and speak everywhere, I don’t find it harsh anymore. The long German words are no more frightening and hard to remember. If you know how they are formed, they are quite logical. So, ‘vielen Danke fu#r Ihre Aufmerksamkeit’.
LEARNING new languages heralds new vistas of knowledge and understanding. Some people learn them for fun, some have interest, some just like to show off and some just have no choice otherwise. When I started learning German, I had two reasons: interest and necessity. One would ask, why German? People in our country, when they do learn, opt for languages such as French, which sounds so ‘sophisticated’. German is not, so to say, a beautiful language and it even sounds harsh at times. But when you have to pack up and go to Germany for a long stay, you don’t have much choice. On top of that, people kept telling me things like “you cannot survive even for a minute on English”, “Germans are very particular about their language”, “they refuse to speak and understand you if you talk to them in English”, etc.
