Life in German - Leben in Deutsch

Wow! It's been a while since I last blogged.  Fall was a bit of a blur with awful, debilitating allergies I had never experienced and the holiday season was a blur for other reasons one of which was too much glühwein.

With the new year, I have found myself reflecting on the whirlwind that has been our life over the past 6 months.  Life in German has its challenges especially since High German and the German spoken in Vienna (Viennese) can be quite different.  They have different words for certain things and just a different way of doing things than Germans I've met.  I recently had to learn to tell time in German and Viennese.  Telling time in German is similar to the way we tell time in English.  The Viennese, however,  confuse it a bunch.  To say it's 4:15, you basically say "viertel fünf" which loosely translates into "a quarter has passed on the way to five".

Another gem in this language is that there is no rule as to how many nouns you can string together to make a word.  The longest word in the German language is "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan"which means "Danube steamship company captain." I'm not making this up. There is a reason people do not interrupt German speakers - you have to wait for them to get to through all the nouns to understand what they are trying to say!

Life in German has become far easier after several months of German class preceded by Rosetta Stone. Don't get me wrong, the majority of people speak English. But working knowledge of the language makes it so much easier.  It's an easy language in the sense that English borrows many of its words from German.  My teacher who studied linguistics says that if you took a book written in Old English and one written in Old German, the texts would look almost identical.  No coincidence when you think that the British were known as Anglo "Saxons" for some time.

However, the written language, whether German or Viennese, can be confusing.  Capitalization is tricky.  In English, you capitalize the names of persons, places or things.  In German, ALL nouns (dog, cat, etc) are capitalized.  You can have a sentence with multiple capitalized nouns stuck in a long noun string. Pronouns are also never capitalized, not even I/ich.  But You/Sie, the formal form of "you" (as in Usted or Vous) is ALWAYS capitalized. It's confusing at first because "sie" with no capitalization refers to "she" and is never capitalized unless at the beginning of a sentence.

Then, there is the separable verb issue.  First of all, verbs MUST come in no later than the second word.  Second, some verbs with prefixes are considered separable. Take abfahren which means "to depart." You have to separate "ab"(from) from "fahren" (drive).  You conjugate "fahren" which turns into "fahrt".  Then to make a sentence, you have to add the "ab" back in at the end of the sentence.  So the sentence "The train from Frankfurt to Munich departs at 9:45" is written "Die Bahn (or Zug) fahrt Frankfurt nach München um neun (9) Uhr fünf und vierzig ) 45 ab." Crazy right? I will not even try explaining irregular verbs.

I can now read (rather skim) the "Bezirk Zeitung" (district newspaper) and get the gist of what a majority of articles are about.  When in doubt of a particular word, Google translate steps in.

A word about Google Translate....It tends to translate in a literal way not taking into account grammatical differences.  Hence, using Google Translate ends up leaving the original sentence lost in translation and not making a lot of sense. I run my Google creations by my teacher to ensure the grammar is correct.  Great for looking up words though.  

Those are just some of the joys of studying a new language every couple of years. I have now studied English, Spanish, French, Polish and now German in depth and have dabbled in Italian and Portuguese (so similar to Spanish).  I find myself really interested in the evolution of human language.  All languages evolve but some older forms can be found in places that are cut off from the rest of the country, like rural areas, which is why the new way to say something is lost if you travel out to the countryside.  I may consider pursuing another degree in this field in the future since it mixes history with language, two things I really enjoy.