Lady in the Medieval City
learns Cherman with a zoom zoom zoom and Celine Dion
My first semester of college, I signed up for a course called Intro to Psycholinguistics. As a kid who'd saved Latin, I figured I'd have a knack for linguistics and, uh, the name was cool. It took me a couple lectures to realize that the term the professor kept repeating was parser. I kept hearing purse sandwiched into sentences and didn’t know what the noun was doing there. Why was purse also being used as a verb? Parsing the word parser didn't shred my ignorance so much as begin to make me aware of it.
If you've ever heard someone speak and not been able to separate the sound into distinct words in your mind, you've had trouble parsing. Or maybe you can distinguish words, but you don’t know which ones signify subjects and which ones are actions. In a language where sentences are made up of multiple repeating components, like sequences of Lego blocks, you might start by focusing on the sounds that repeat. As I started to learn German, I thought I knew exactly which sounds to listen for.
My chutzpah came from memorizing comedy bits mocking German accents1: everything by Mel Brooks, the nihilists in The Big Lebowski, Mike Meyers and his Dieter on Saturday Night Live, and last but not least, Tracey Ullman's Angela Merkel impersonation. Due to these excellent artists, most of what I used to recognize as "German” was the pronunciation of V with an F, of W with a V, of S with a Th, of Th with Z, and lots of choppy consonants (Ds—>Ts, Ch—>Tch, etc.).
Also due to these excellent artists, I have often had trouble taking Germans speaking English seriously.
“I am FERRY upset!” I heard a man say the other day.
Look at you! I thought. Going to be an 80s movie villain when you grow up? Did your girlfriend cut off her toe?
To complicate matters, Germans speaking English, namely my husband, often drop the helping verbs. They don't use them in present-tense German because there is almost no future tense: everything is present, all the time. Where I would ask if I should go to the store, or say that I am going to the store, my husband says, “I go to the store.”
I + action verb = sentence.
During Season 1 of the Pandemic2, I slid into speaking English like Markus, but without the accent. We started to develop our own pigeon Gerglish/Engman, which came to a screeching halt one day when, discussing when to take our big walk outside for the day, Markus — the man I've since married, this writer-director who is possibly the gentlest, most intuitive empath I've ever met — turned to me and said, matter-of-factly, “I fuck you later.”
Excuse me?
He took a deep breath, slowed down to enunciate, and said, “I FACK-uum later."
My man was going to vacuum. As in: clean the apartment with a device meant to suck up dust and debris. Who said German wasn't sexy?
Over the past several months of intensive German 3 hours a night, Monday through Thursday, I began to pick up on the fact that German included a sound I hadn't expected. The ZOOM sound. I hate this sound because I hate zoom, the technology, particularly when used for group work meetings. And in German, zoom is pronounced with a T at the front, like you’re spitting out the sound: tzoom!
“This is killing your social life,” said a friend. She was talking about the class, but the same could be said of zoom and the German language itself. Where my brain used to hold a working stable of English vocabulary, entire words and phrases have disappeared. I’ll interrupt my own sentences while speaking, forced to pause as I try to remember a word for a thing.
What does it do? What is it used for? Markus will prompt, as if we’re playing charades — and what rises from the muck of my mind is ZOOM.
Meanwhile, German sentences will often sound like german german german ZOOM german. I couldn’t parse the ZOOM until, finally, we learned abbreviations in class: z.B. is zum Beispiel. It means “for example.”
And just like anything a person learns to identify, I started hearing it all the time. Which made sense in my nightly class: zum Beispiel, how else are you supposed to learn unless you are given examples? But what does not make sense is why zum Beispiel should be used in just about every German conversation I have encountered since learning the phrase. People could be talking about the work day, about what they want for lunch, about what they are going to do on the weekend: whatever they are talking about, they are saying zum Beispiel. Every conversation sounds like 1992, if you’re familiar with that decade and/or hiphop.
Jesus Christ, I’ve been thinking to myself, NOBODY says “for example” this much!
It’s the German equivalent of LIKE in English: it’s a pause-filler. Which is okay, I guess, until you consider that the Italian equivalent is Allora, pronounced Ah-lohr-a: a word that sounds like a song and a curse at the same time. Sometimes I stop at an Italian market on the way to German class just to cleanse my mental apparatus with beautiful sounds and grammar that makes sense.
Zum Beispiel: the articles in Italian match the nouns they go with. La donna is the woman. The “ah” sound repeats at the end. In German, die Frau (dee Frow) is the woman. No sound repeats; the words do not match. Zum Beispiel, as Mark Twain pointed out, das Mädchen is German for the girl. Not only do the sounds not match, but we’ve got two different articles for words that, in English, would be in the same category. The article for woman in German is die. Die is feminine, but das, the article for girl, is NEUTER.
“How the hell am I going to remember which words get die (dee) in front of them?” I ranted to my friend Dominik. (I never have to pause to find a curse word.)
And then Dominik saved my life with this simple trick: though not all feminine German nouns end the same way, all words that end in -ung are feminine. And so all words ending in -ung (zum Beispiel: Kleidung and Bewebung3) have the article die.
And the way to remember this is by keeping The Queen herself in mind: Celine die-UNG. CELINE DION.
Which brings me to my favorite Celine Dion song. I dedicate it to Alan Rickman, rest in peace, and to everyone out there who needs to vacuum later.
Because they deserve it.
Credit for this phrase is due to Wesley Morris and J Wortham on the excellent podcast “Still Processing,” which is where I first heard it.
die Kleidung = the clothing / die Bewebung = the movement
This was funny. I am a native English speaker, my second language is Spanish. And your Zoom story reminded me of a time when, after living in Chile and mostly hearing Spanish, I realized hearing others speak English that it’s Slytherin. Ssssss, sssss, ssss all the time, starting and ending words.
German grammar, jawohl! My mom decided at one point to just use “die.” I found it frustrating when Germans would point out the grammatically correct way of asking a question (“Wem schenkst du die Blumen?) which was about as arbitrary as the queens bringing the torches to the sailors in Latin class. Anyways, my partner is Bulgarian and sounds like Borat most of the time!