love of the game

Monday nights is Polish class, Wednesday morning is German. Each is a private lesson with a great instructor. They are different in methodology, but both skilled and adaptive to my learning style so I feel that I am progressing in both.

Language comes easy to me, excluding tonal languages such as Chinese. It's a game, the words, and how you put them together are the rules. The better you know the rules the more you can strategize to win the game.

Others eloquently state how learning a language is akin to gaining another soul or a inside window into a culture, and it remains true. When a word/concept does not exist for a word/concept that you know, it tells you something about the culture. Or when one word exists elsewhere, but not in your language.

As time goes on, however, it becomes more and more clear that I do not love German, and I never will and in learning it I'm going through the motions. I'm fortunate that I pick up so much without trying, so that makes things passable. When I speak Spanish or my simple Polish, it flows. My German is more just 'there'. It's like something that is not noticed when it is acceptable. No one extols the virtue of a coat hanger or a fork, it's only noticed when it is not acceptable. My Spanish or Polish, however, is like my shoes from Paris. My shoes from Paris are noticed and admired and make me feel nice because they are comfortable yet they look damn good at the same time.

In thinking further, it is not necessarily anything about the Germans in particular or their language, besides the things that every other expat blog details greatly about life in Germany.

More specifically, I think of German like I think of swimming. Growing up in the Phillyland area, everyone learns how to swim, especially because summer weekends are spent at the Jersey shore and that is one hell of an undertow. You must learn to swim at a passable level as a child. And every child lives somewhere near a public pool that won't break the bank. I, like all of my peers, learned how to swim over a few summers so that I passed the intermediate level requirements. It involved getting into the pool at the god-awful hour of 7 something in the morning, because my parents worked and I was therefore a part of the early morning round of swimming lessons.

I loathe cold water and I particularly loathe mornings. Putting them together makes it an exponential loathing. I learned how to swim because my mother would have insisted on many more years of such requirements if I could not suck it up and get the skill. Also, because it's an expected skill in that area of the country and there are many activities in addition to the shore that involve water exposure, and quite frankly, growing up in Philadelphia is tough and you will get no California psycho-babble in reference to fear of water. Instead you will get pushed in the deep end and be expected to learn the hard way if you can't get things together in a reasonable amount of time. Although granted, if I would have had a love of the water I could have pursued it. A few souls always do and there are those kids who go on to swim team or related things like crew.

I think of learning the German language in the same way. Living in Germany without German is like living in Philly and not being able to swim. Sure you can live as such, but you won't be able to safely go into the ocean or to a pool party so you're limited. I will never take a German literature course or speak like a angel in German. Just like I will never swim competitively or go to my local public pool here at 7 AM for the early AM swim. It just doesn't mean enough to me.

As long as I can get around acceptably and I am not being impeded on the lack of a skill level, I probably will not go to great lengths to increase my current established skill set. Sure, I'll go to class and perform at a reasonable level because my company pays for it but I will not be the best and at this point in life, it is precisely because I don't see the point that I really don't care, that I need to acknowledge that. And acknowledging that is immensely freeing.