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• I’m increasingly-unable to remember what language a particular conversation was had in. I can usually conclude that the language was German, but only because that’s the default; I can’t be sure that it wasn’t French or English. This is especially true since I got to know a group of Belgians in the course of our excursion to Karlsruhe: all of them speak English, German and French, but one’s German is weak, while another’s English could use work; accordingly, the language spoken tends to be different every time I run into them, and will switch back-and-forth rapidly.

  On a related note, I generally can’t remember what language advertisements or shop-signs are written in. Again, I default to assuming that it’s German, but my memory has stopped recording that detail.

• The first few weeks we were here, all the exchange student groups (American, Italian, etc) tended to speak only German amongst themselves, seeminly loathe to use their native language. Now it seems that the newness of the thing has worn off, as we all speak our mother tongue much more often than we did in the early days.

  On the other hand, the languages tend to mix much more readily than they used to. I used to make a very clear mental distinction, “I am now speaking German”, “I am now speaking English”, etc, and there would be a momentary spin-up period while those particular vocabulary centers activated. That distinction is no longer made, and I no-longer consider it unusual to switch languages two or three times in the space of four sentences.

  I sometimes get special practice at this during the conversation tables (which are going quite well, thank you). Last week, for example, the English of one of the girls there wasn’t quite up to the level of the others, and she had a tough time following some of the conversations. I played interpreter for her for the duration of that particular exchange, then later, when she and I were talking, we fell into a pattern where she would speak to me in German, then I would repeat back what she had said in English before responding to her question, again in English.

• I had my first experiences with German dialects recently. In the store the other day, and on TV last week, there were people speaking what I could recognise as some vaguely German-related language, but that sounded to me like a simple stream of incomprehensible gibberish. It makes me grateful for coming from a language where the biggest difference in “dialects” is that Americans say “trunk”, while, on the other side of an ocean, the Brits say “boot”.

This past Saturday, the university organised a trip to Nuremberg, primarily to visit the massive Christmas market that the city hosts.

I don’t remember the exact German word they used to describe the market when outlining the trip, but it can’t have been adequate to capture the raw size of this thing. Starting near the Lorenzkirche, it took us around 20 minutes to reach the far end, near the Church of St. Sebaldus (this panorama shot shows the distance pretty well). Note that when I say 20 minutes, that’s the simple length; it doesn’t include the numerous sidestreets and Nebenplaetze the market spilled over into. The market takes up most of the Altstadt, filling the place with hundreds of vendors selling Lebkuchen (gingerbread, in all shapes, sizes and flavours), Gluehwein (hot, spiced red wine) and every kind of sausage you can imagine.

Since this was the first weekend of the market (they take place all over Germany each Advent Sunday), the place was absolutely packed, and since Nuremberg’s market is one of the most famous ones, the American tourists were out in force. I had previously thought that all the stereotypes about “the ugly American abroad” were just unfortunate exaggerations. Turns out, it’s all true: we could usually hear the Americans before we could see them. In the Frauenkirche, for example, I overheard an American saying to his wife, “I think it’s called the ‘Woman Church’ or something like that; that’s kinda-a stupid name, ‘Woman Church’, but whatever” (to his credit, “Frauenkirche” does literally translate to “Woman’s Church”). In the market, an American shouted at Sarah (another American, ironically) to move her ass out of his goddamn photo — in English.

One of the interesting — and tragic — things about a lot of the attractions in Nuremberg is that most of them have a sign somewhere saying “…partially destroyed in 1945…”, “…totally destroyed in 1945…”, “…burned to the ground in 1945…”, etc. The naves of the Church of St Sebaldus are blackened from where it was torched. Charlotte and I want to go back to Nuremberg in a few months to go see the ruins from the Third Reich; Nuremberg was the original hotbed of Nazi activity, and most of the ceremonial grounds, for example, still stand (where Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens is set).

Miscellaneous notes:

• I don’t have any pictures of the inside of the Lorenzkirche (there’s a strict no-photography policy in place), so you’ll just have to take my word that it was a goregous, cavernous example of the Gothic style, with altars and stained glass pieces dating back to the 1500’s.

• The high on Saturday was 0C. I went the whole day without being able to feel my toes.

• The Italians we were with said they had seen several groups of Italian tourists in the market, and when we recounted the behaviour of the Americans we had seen, they reassured us that their countrymen were just as bad. I guess tourism is a universal syndrome.

• Gluehwein is good, but only in small doses; it tends to make you queasy pretty quickly. Also, it’s one of those things that, like tea, smells better than it tastes.

• Message to the German nation: leather pants are not acceptable, ever, for any reason — especially for everyday wear. (Seriously, you would not believe how many people we saw walking around in leather pants on Saturday).

All photos from Nuremberg are, as usual, available on Flickr.

Ok, I know I said that my schedule had finally settled down. I lied.

On Wednesday (or whatever day it was), I attended my first meeting of Text Production II. Ten minutes later, I was back in the hallway, making my way back to the board where listing of German classes is posted. As it turns out, this is a class you have to test into, or at least formally enroll in — neither of which, clearly, had I done.

So, I’m back at the drawing board. I’m planning to pick up a lecture series on post-war German literature for two hours, but I’m not quite sure where the rest is coming from (since it was only five minutes ago that I realised I still need an additional two credit hours).

In other news, Arabic is still the prime factor getting me through my week. I’m finally getting a handle on the alphabet and some of their more difficult sounds (e.g., three separate H consonants, plus four consonant pairs that are only differentiated by how the following vowels are pronounced). Portuguese is fun, too; I’m the only male and the only non-German, so I get used in just about every example the professor comes up with. Tidbit: it’s by far the most nasal language I’ve ever heard.

PS: you would not believe what’s playing on the radio right now. Do you remember a song by the Bloodhound Gang called “The Bad Touch“? This is a dance remix.

Update: The other two hours will come from a lecture series on the history of the German language from the time of Martin Luther to the present. Woo. Hoo.

Saturday, 12 Nov. - 4/5ths of the American contingent took the train 15 minutes north, to the relative metropolis of Speyer. The plan was to take in three of the churches there in the morning, then spend the afternoon being good little consumers.

The churches, to be frank, were disappointing. The first two, the Church of St Joseph and the Gedaechtniskirche (En: “Memorial Church”, or something like that) were either closed, under heavy renovation, or both. After those, we walked to the Kaiserdom (En: “Cathedral of the Emperor”), a 1000-year-old cathedral that houses the remains of a number of Holy Roman Emperors and the like. Despite the history of the place, though, it was still a bit disappointing: it’s not especially beautiful, nor overwhelmingly massive. It’s just kinda big. The most impressive portion was the crypts and the tombs of the emperors (but that’s not something you take pictures of).

The shopping portion of the trip, though, was a rousing success. I made off with four sweaters for a measly €60, so I’m quite happy.

Sunday, 13 Nov. - Working off a tip from one of our contacts at the university, Charlotte and I headed off to go find a walking path that had been rumoured to run along the Rhein river. I was expecting something of moderate length, possibly like the Riverwalk in Chattanooga or the Greenway in Murfreesboro. What I got exceeded my wildest expectations: after walking for two hours, the setting sun forced us to turn around without seeing the end of the path. And there’s more: when we met up with the main walkway, we turned right; there’s another fork that runs left.

We’re planning to return next Sunday, start earlier in the morning, possibly invite some of the Italians and make a picnic of the whole thing.

Oh: in true German fashion, in the middle of nowhere, accessible only by bike or foot, there’s a pub just off the walking path.

Saturday, 19 Nov. - Charlotte, the Italians and I are planning a trip to Karlsruhe, a big city 30 minutes south by train. Like the trip to Speyer, the order of the day will be shopping and churches. Hopefully, both will be more impressive than the offerings in Speyer.

Saturday, 26 Nov. - The exchange student office has organised a trip to Nuremberg. The highlight of the trip will be the Christmas market there, but the trip’s information sheet also lists a number of cathedrals and museums that are must-sees. This is where we’re planning to do the bulk of our Christmas shopping.

Saturday, 3 Dec. or 10 Dec. - Once again, Charlotte, the Italians and I are plotting a weekend escape from our small-town surroundings. Our destination: Strasbourg, France, 1:45 south as the rails run. Strasbourg has a number of preposterously beautiful cathedrals (so we’re told), and, frankly, we all like the idea of popping down to France for dinner.

This particular trip will be interesting because only two or three of our little group speak even the vaguest hint of French. I know an MTSU exchange student in Besancon, France (two hours or so south of Strasbourg), and we may have to convince him to come up and play interpretter for us.

The weekend of 9 Dec. or 16 Dec. - Another MTSU exchange student I know is studying in Normandy, France, this semester, and I have to go visit her before she leaves on 21. December. Andrew, the student from Besancon, has expressed interest in going to see her as well, so we may just make a thing of it.

Now that all the paperwork and red-tape has been dealt with, and my school schedule has finally settled down, I’m finally starting to get a feel for the university. Verdict: I hate this place.

Listen: I was taught German and Japanese the old way, the wrong way. Anything that involves students learning a language via a grammar book, tables of verb conjugations and endless files of rules — these simply do not work. Rather than exploiting the mind’s natural language-acquisition pathways, the old methods opt to simply bludgeon the brain into submission. “Brain-antagonistic learning”, they call it.

French, on the other hand, I learned the right way. Total Physical Reponse, the style used to teach me French, is designed to mimic the way humans acquire language during infancy. Our only textbooks were simple novels. Grammar was made explicit only when the students asked for it. Despite this, up until actually moving to Germany, I felt far more confident in my spoken French than in my spoken German. I went from zero French to being able to read Le Monde in eight months; it took me years to get to that stage in German.

I would have to invent new idioms, new turns of phrase, to accurately convey the difference in results. To say I’m bitter over the way I was taught German would be to misuse the word; it is simply not up to the task.

Let us concoct a timeline. At the most recent end, place brain-compatible techniques like TPR. Somewhat further back in time, that’s where we find the methods by which I learned German and Japanese. Now, at the furthest end, somewhere over the horizon and around the corner, you find the university I’m currently attending. This place makes the Spanish Inquisition look like progressive thinking.

I have heard it said that this university is one of the best schools in Europe for translation and interpreting. This may well be true, provided you already know several languages before enrolling here. If, however, you’re unfortunate enough to come from a country where they wait until high school to so much as pretend to teach you a foreign language, or if you have the silly notion that you’ll pick up another language or two while here, or both, forget it. The introductory language courses here all work the same way: let’s say the traditional American method is equivalent to target-shooting with a shotgun at 100 meters; a lot of pellets are going to miss, but you’ll still get some hits. The methods used here, however, are like moving the target out to 1000 meters: one or two pellets might hit the target…maybe…if the wind is right.

Since I clearly don’t know enough about guns to come up with an effective similie, here’s the scoop: students come into class, the professor spends 90 minutes throwing out random tidbits of information (which may or may not have some kind of “structure” to them), the students leave to go spend the rest of the day in the library trying to figure out what the hell they were supposed to have gleaned from the lecture. The primary method of instruction here seems to be students, alone with a book, memorising vocabulary and grammar rules. This is so stupid, so backwards, that I’m loathe to give it the dignity of a proper debunking.

Thousands of years ago, so the story goes, the king of Egypt wanted to find out what the original language of man was, that is, what language we defaulted to in absence of external stimuli. To this end, he took two new-borns and placed them in a remote hut, far from any other people. The only person to visit them would be their nursemaid, whose tongue had been cut out, so that she would not contaminate them. After several years, the king brought the children back to his palace, eager to hear them speak. The only word they could produce, so the scribes recorded, was bekos, the word for “bread” in some ancient dialect of Egyptian. The king thusly concluded that Egyptian was indeed the One True Language for mankind.

Unbeknownst to the king, however, was that every so often, herds of sheep would come by the infants’ hut. The child weren’t speaking Egyptian at all — they were simply imitating the only speech they had ever heard: the baaas of the passing sheep.

Humans do not — cannot — learn language in a vacuum. Language is a social tool, conferred upon and conveyed to us by society; that is, other people. Any belief that students can learn language, any language, in the quiet of the library stacks, nose deep in a book, is wrong. There is no other word for it.

A final rant: in my Introduction to Linguistics seminar yesterday, the professor divided the students into small groups, our task being to debate the question, “Where is better German spoken: in the cities or in the country?” Now, this question is pretty much standard in any intro linguistics class. Students will get into heated debates, defending their choice, unaware that it’s a trick question. The correct answer is that there’s no such thing as “better” or “worse” when it comes to language.

The classic American example is Ebonics vs Network Standard English. Both are merely dialects of English, and so long as speakers obey the respective grammar of their chosen dialect, neither is better or worse than the other — they simply are. The only value judgement possible is a cultural one, and since the American upper class speaks Network Standard, it follows that Ebonics, the language of the lower class, is generally perceived as being inferior.

So, given that I’d seen this exercise play out before, I was not at all surprised when various groups of students opined that, before we could address the question proper, we’d first have to work out our terminology: how many people are required to call a place a “city”, what metric are we using for “better”, etc. What I was not prepared for, however, was the professor agreeing with them; he concurred entirely, saying that, Yes, we need to define these terms before proceding, and we would work on definitions next week.

It’s going to be a long semester.

Today marks four weeks since I flew off to the Old Country. My thoughts thus far:

• Though all the other Americans have reported varying stages of homesickness (De: Heimweh), I’ve yet to feel its effects. I’ll be fairly surprised if I ever do, though, since I’ve never felt homesick in my life. On a related note, I’ve yet to experience anything like what culture shock has been described as. I’ve been told that that generally kicks in at around 6-8 weeks, but these are the same people who’ve assured me that I should be homesick right about now, so we’ll see.

• I can feel my German improving every day. For the first few days after arrival, I was mildly apprehensive about being drawn into conversation, but that’s all gone now. I can carry on with my peers without any shred of anxiety.

  The only language-related frustration I have is that I feel very hemmed-in by the subset of German I’m currently capable of. That is, I’m pretty good at this whole “English” thing, but I have yet to translate my English-language idiolect into German. I speak what feels to be a relatively flat German, without anything approaching the flourish I wield in my native tongue.

  Missing: one (1) sense of rhetorical style — please return if found.

  Worse yet, it feels like my sense of humor has been carved out cleanly. The perception side is intact, but production numbers are down dramatically in the last quarter, and the head office is very unhappy about this. Having a reputation of “funny”, being able to make people laugh and smile — regardless of time and place — these things are incredibly important to me. Yes, I can still be funny after a fashion, but only after a fashion; the humor I’m capable of here feels clumsy, dull. I am accustomed to much sharper instruments.

  Though I realise that this level of command requires time to develop, that does nothing to lessen the aggravation of this intervening period. It’s like some fold of brain has been damaged, two-thirds of my vocabulary simply up and vanished.

• Random notes. The following things have stopped surprising me:

  • German school children are never in school. I can go out at any time of day and see groups of what appear to be school-age kids roaming the town on their own. I keep having to suppress the urge to call a truant officer. (Yes, I’ve had a native explain this to me; I’m still going to mine it for humor material, though.)

  • Asians speaking German. Other Americans have made this same observation: there’s just something very strange about Chinese or Japanese exchange students speaking German. It’s not that I had thought them incapable of it or anything — German is just a very un-Asian language.

  • I was totally unprepared for the assortment of dairy products I would encounter here. In the US, the grocery stores carry a single type of cream (heavy whipping cream); here, I’m confronted regularly by no fewer than five separate varieties.

    Further: in American grocery stores, there’s a meat counter and a bakery, both of which are generally fairly small. The back wall of the supermarket here is divided evenly between a massive butcher shop and an equally massive cheese emporium. I swear they just make up whole new cheeses back there, just for fun.

  • There are walls of wine in the grocery store. Pastries are practically free. People look at you funny if you don’t have a beer in your hand during a meal.

    My arteries love this place.

These past few days have been busy.

I’m now — finally — officially registered with both the city of Germersheim and with the university. Both of these tasks were disarmingly simple; I just went in, handed in some paperwork, and was done. Given that most official business thus far has been a vicious struggle, I was fully prepared to fight one of the secretaries to the death if necessary. I suppose that when your expectations involve hand-to-hand combat, anything short of that is a relief.

End result: an impressively ugly visa stamp plastered across two pages of my passport. Oh, and they charged me €50 for the privilege.

In addition, I’ve been busy trying to arrange my class schedule. The director of the exchange programme said that I should probably take some German classes, and I’ve spent the past week trying to get a handle on what level of German I should be taking. Initial conclusion was that the best fit would be Portuguese I.

Listen: I’ve visited a number of translation classes, spanning all levels and a number of languages (German, English and French). All the German->English courses, even at the higher levels, were far too easy; formulating sentences in my native tongue is something I no longer need special practice at. The other classes (French->German and English->German), on the other hand, were out of the question: the professors made it quite clear that, if I were to attend class with the German natives, I would be held to exactly the same standards. (Sidebar: the professor in the French->German class followed this up with a rant about how stupid and ignorant Americans are).

While my initial solution involved replacing any semblance of German classes with Portuguese, I quickly got word from MTSU that if I want to receive credit toward my German degree, it would be in my best interest to actually study German while here. My schedule is now as follows:

• 8 hours - Arabic I

• 4 hours - Portuguese I

• 4 hours - Text production II (German)

• 3 hours - Translation: German -> American English

• 2 hours - Proseminar over the German political system

• 2 hours - Introduction to linguistics (offered by the German department)

• 1 hour - Directed readings with discussion (German)

Hopefully, this will be the last time my schedule changes.

One of the things that still baffles my American-ness is the attitude toward cigarettes in this country. Consider the following:

• There are cigarette vending machines, and they aren’t exactly rare. It’s not uncommon to be able to stand at one cigarette machine and be able to see the next one. Next to my apartment building there are two of these machines within 15 meters of each other. Some even accept credit cards.

• Despite this high-availability, the nominal minimum age to buy cigarettes is 16 (or 18, I can’t remember). All this really means, though, is that you’ll get carded if you try to buy cigarettes from one of the overflowing bins at a supermarket. Of course, since you can just wait till you get outside to buy them, getting carded in this situation also means that you’re stupid.

• You know how in the US, the warnings on cigarette packs are pretty timid? “Cigarettes might, maybe, kinda, possibly hurt you…but only if you coat your lungs in tobacco…and set yourself on fire…but you’ll still be cool.” Here in the EU, they don’t mess around: the cigarette packs here have warnings like “Smoking can lead to a slow and painful death” and “Smoking can be deadly”. One warning effectively says, “Cigarettes contain formaldehyde, tar, and they kill you dead, sucker”.

One final item of note: even though everyone smokes, you’ll never see a cigarette butt thrown out on the ground.

First, the big news: as predicted, I took the placement test over my knee and showed it what-for. This means that I’m now admitted to the university as a full student, with all that that entails.

On the whole, this feels just like being a freshman again, wandering around in total confusion, with no idea how the system works. I’m only now (the next day) beginning to get a handle on the basic mechanics of academic life here:

• At MTSU, there’s a massive book that lists every class section, plus when and where it meets. Here, the class offerings are posted on bulletin boards outside of each department. Sometimes. For example, I have no idea where the bulletin board for the Italian section is.

• At MTSU, everyone registers for classes electronically. Here, you just show up; there’s no official registration process of any kind.

So, I’m taking three Spanish classes and two Arabic classes, for a total of 15 hours. The best part of this whole deal is that, since the university expects all Auslaender to fail the placement test, I’m starting classes a week behind everyone else. Fortunately, the Arabic classes start next week, so I haven’t really missed anything there, but today’s Spanish class was a bit…interesting. I’m lucky that I vaguely know how to conjugate Spanish verbs (which we were talking about), but since I hadn’t yet bought the textbooks, my participation was pretty minimal.

On the other hand, it’s fascinating to hear Spanish explained in terms of German, especially when it comes to word definitions. I love it.

Next week, I’m meeting with one of the academic advisors to try and figure out which German classes I should be in. Once those classes are picked out, I’ll be taking around 24 hours (this is a normal load; the credit hours here are worth slightly less than those state-side).

Other news:

• Charlotte and I had our first Stammtisch session last night, and I think it went pretty well. We had 16+ people show up, with a fairly good range of abilities present. Our insidious plan to exploit our mother-tongue to meet new people is working perfectly! *cackle*

• I signed up today for a trip to Nuremberg that the Foreign Students’ Office is offering. €10 for a day-long excursion sounded pretty good to me. It takes place at the end of November, so one of the highlights will be the Nuremberg Christmas Market.

  As for why the trip is so cheap, all students pay a €90 Sozialbetrag, which goes to defray the cost of outings like this.

• I am still not enrolled in the university. Read that again. I went down to the enrollment office today with a massive sheaf of papers (which I know I’ve already filled out at least once). I was immediately rebuffed, told to return when I had proof of insurance and a receipt for payment of the Sozialbetrag. Here’s the thing: I showed her both my German insurance card and a receipt from the bank from when I transferred the €90 to the school. Neither of these, apparently, is good enough. She told me that the receipt would need an official stamp from the bank in order to be acceptable.

  Off I go to the bank. When I tell them that I need a stamp on this receipt, so they go print off an official piece of paper saying that, yes, this transfer was indeed made. When I insist that I actually need a stamp, they tell me that they don’t have any kind of stamp to put on it, and that even if they did, the print-off should be good enough. Here’s the kicker: just a few hours before, they had stamped Charlotte’s transfer receipt. Maybe they lost the stamp, I don’t know.

  The battle resumes Monday.

For two weeks now, everyone here has assured us poor Auslaender that we would most certainly fail the Orientierungspruefung (En: the test that determines whether you’re admitted to the university or whether you have to take a German intensive first). Dark and terrible visions were conjured before us: it was to be the sum of our collective academic nightmares, a combination AP History exam, ACT and doctoral thesis — all in German and covering the most nuanced aspects of Tutonic grammar, rhetorical style and the art of page-long sentences. In short, we were to tremble before its very name.

Thus prepared, two rooms of exchange students assembled this morning, somber, resigned to their sure fate, and to each was handed an instance of this new and wonderous terror. Locked in mortal combat for 90 grueling minutes, I emerged once again, a hollow shell of he who I had once been.

Yeah, right. I’ve had harder tests than this in PE. The test consisted of a single page of basic grammar (I can only assume the question asking for various tenses of nehmen was some kind of joke) followed by a page of reading comprehension and a final page of short essays. The only hard part was when they asked for synonyms or explications of German words (quick: give a definition of “to dismiss” in English). I know that I missed the question asking for various tenses of leiden (En: to suffer), but I didn’t feel too bad about that, since it was included as an irregular verb, and I’ve never used it’s participle or imperfect forms.

On the whole, I felt pretty good about the test, though I’m sure it’s one of those things where you have to get every question right in order to pass. The university, however, is so confident that we failed that we’re given our schedules for the German intensive series before we find out the results (the results come tomorrow morning, the schedules this afternoon). I plan on buying a bottle of wine, regardless of the outcome, either to celebrate or to mourn accordingly.

Other news:

• Charlotte and I got the job as Konversationsabendleiter/in (En: a bunch of students get together to practice their English, and we’re there in our capacity as native speakers). We were also invited to attend a professor’s translation classes, again to serve as native speakers. We think both of these will serve as excellent ways of meeting people.

• We attended the German version of the Stammtisch (a synonym for Konversationsabend) on Monday night. There were four other Auslaender there: a pair of Ukrainians and a pair of Italians. None of us, I get the feeling, will be returning. The Stammtisch was lead by two Germans who seemed to be making an effort to talk as fast as they possibly could; asking them to slow down only made them go faster.

  I’m planning to attend the French conversation table (on Wednesdays, I believe) and Charlotte and I are toying with the idea of hitting the conversation table for British English on Tuesdays. That promises to be a smashing good time.

• We’ve been hanging out a lot with the Italian contingent here. Sylvia, one of the alpha females in the group (note to self: I am not Jane Goodall), lives on Charlotte’s floor, and she and I have promised to teach one another our respective cuisines. Tonight is my turn: I shall be making gumbo.

  I’ve been inviting as many people as possible, intending fully to exploit my culinary abilities to make friends.

END TRANSMISSION