A Crash Course in German

Made it to Germany in one piece and so far I am loving it here. I’ve been working hard to pick up bits of language so that I can communicate and am quite proud of myself for what I have accomplished in a mere 7 days. When I got on the plane I could count to 100, when I got off I knew a handful of verbs and how to conjugate them. By the time we made it to Rotheburg ob der Tauber I was making simple sentences and by the time we made it to Waldkirch I had started talking in front of strangers and can even understand simple words and phrases.

Then again my first foray into the German language was not entirely successful. Which is to say that my first German sentance was, "Wieveil kostest du?". (How much do you cost?)

Before you wonder what sort of trip you’ve sent your children on, allow me to explain. Before I left for the trip, I printed out a list of the "50 most useful German verbs" and I spent the majority of the plane trip practicing conjugating them as I was trying to get a feel for the pronunciations. I was basically going through all of verbs I knew and trying them with the different endings.

When I got to the verb "kosten" I ran into trouble as the 2nd person form of the verb (kostst) looked like a bit of a mouthful. So I turned to Jack who was sitting next to me to ask how I was supposed to pronounce it and he thought about it for a second or two before wisely informing me that I probably was not going to need the 2nd person form of the verb "to cost".

I’d like to say that my German language skills improved by leaps and bounds after this initial confusion. After all, your children have been very kindly attempting to teach me the language and are quite enjoying assigning me one new word each to learn every day. It is thanks to them that I am able to say such useful sentences as, "Dine papguy ist häßlick". (Your parrot is ugly.)

Alas, they’ve neglected a few of the basics as evidenced by the situation I found myself in just the other day.

Here I should mention that getting from Rothernburg ob der Tauber with 10 students is no mean feat and indeed involved changing trains no less than 6 times. As some of the changes between trains were fairly tight (the shortest a mere 4 minutes), we made a rule that if you needed to use the bathroom you had to do it on the train. So it was that I found myself desperate to use the bathroom just after we left Stuttgart. Fortunately the compartment we were in had a gigantic handicapped bathroom right in it.

I used the toilet and had a brief moment of confusion as I tried to figure out how to flush it as on the wall beside it were three buttons none of which were labelled in a way that I could comprehend. I decided that the one closest to the toilet was probably the one I wanted but when I pressed it a loud alarm sounded and a moment later a voice addressed me over the intercom. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that," I replied in a panicked combination of English and German. It seems I had pressed the emergency call button by accident.

I tried a different button and then stumbled out of the bathroom in hysterical laughter. "Who were you talking to?" the kids demanded. In between gasps for breath, I told them.

I was understandably quite pleased to leave that train far behind.