Long time, no see, blog....and for good reasons. I spend enough time in front of the computer as it is, and the awesome Austrian healthcare system just generously sponsored my 10 sessions of physical therapy for persistent inflammations in my right elbow, which, no doubt, are a result of too much computer use. And at this point, I am used to living in Austria again, so the urge to write about cultural differences and Austrian peculiarities is not as great. But this last week was one of severe cultural input, and one thing in particular got me thinking today.
When you leave Tucson, point your car North and drive for 5 hours, you
end up at a big precipice called the Grand Canyon. You are still in
Arizona, people still speak English and eat steaks with baked potatoes, the rocks
are still red, the climate is still dry, there are a few more trees.
When you leave Vienna, point South, and a little West, and drive for 5
hours, you end up at the Adriatic Sea, for example in Trieste.
There are still mountains and trees, but the climate is warmer, you have driven through the entirety of Slovenia, food-wise you have died and gone to heaven, and people have stopped speaking your language hours ago. Resisting the temptation to digress into musings about the history connected to that drive (after all, it used to be all Austria 100 years ago, and the most direct route, in terms of kilometers, meant crossing the Iron Curtain twice 30 years ago), let me dedicate this entry to the language aspect:
My Italian is pretty darn bad. I learned it for three low-intensity years in school, without too much enthusiasm, thanks to the incredibly tacky Italian book we had, and due to my difficulty cramming Italian between the slots in my brain that I had assigned to Latin and French. Nowadays, I have probably less than 100 words active vocab, food items and musical terminology included. (Passive vocab is a different story: Latin and French are your best friends - but sometimes also your worst enemies - when facing an Italian text.) I can barely hold up my own ordering food, and things go pretty steeply downhill left and right of that. Past tense? With difficulty. Future, conjunctives? Forget it. But whenever I am in Italy, I get to use every single bit of Italian I ever learned and then some. For starters, there simply is no English or German information in a lot of places.
There are still mountains and trees, but the climate is warmer, you have driven through the entirety of Slovenia, food-wise you have died and gone to heaven, and people have stopped speaking your language hours ago. Resisting the temptation to digress into musings about the history connected to that drive (after all, it used to be all Austria 100 years ago, and the most direct route, in terms of kilometers, meant crossing the Iron Curtain twice 30 years ago), let me dedicate this entry to the language aspect:
My Italian is pretty darn bad. I learned it for three low-intensity years in school, without too much enthusiasm, thanks to the incredibly tacky Italian book we had, and due to my difficulty cramming Italian between the slots in my brain that I had assigned to Latin and French. Nowadays, I have probably less than 100 words active vocab, food items and musical terminology included. (Passive vocab is a different story: Latin and French are your best friends - but sometimes also your worst enemies - when facing an Italian text.) I can barely hold up my own ordering food, and things go pretty steeply downhill left and right of that. Past tense? With difficulty. Future, conjunctives? Forget it. But whenever I am in Italy, I get to use every single bit of Italian I ever learned and then some. For starters, there simply is no English or German information in a lot of places.
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| Civico Museo del Mare in Trieste: You figure it out. |
There may be an
English menu here or there in the center of town, but the staff are
clearly more comfortable speaking Italian, as are the majority of people I interact with. I find myself pulling things
out of my brain that I learned more than 15 years ago, and to my utter
surprise, people seem to make sense of the garbage I speak, and - this is
the critical point - they keep speaking Italian back to me. They take my inelegant efforts seriously, they slow down, they are patient, friendly, and appreciative.
It really got me thinking, because on many days, I witness the exact opposite situation: Steve's German is pretty good. My guess is that when we met, it was already better than my Italian. He is not someone who likes to talk garbage, but his German is good enough he does not have to resort to that. He is just not fluent yet. But when he tries to do anything in German, from buying a railway ticket to asking a question in orchestra rehearsal, he has almost no room for mistakes, or even slight hesitation. Within no time, his conversation partner will switch into fluent English instead of slowing down their German or switching out of Austrian dialect. Which is ok for the railway ticket booth, but gets a little old in orchestra, where people know exactly that he is living here, and even, in principle, want him (and every other foreigner) to learn German. In practice, he gets almost no chance to recuperate from even a small mistake in a German conversation. It doesn't even take a mistake: When he does not hear something properly, say, because of background noise, his request for a repeat will be enough to tip the conversation into English.
It really got me thinking, because on many days, I witness the exact opposite situation: Steve's German is pretty good. My guess is that when we met, it was already better than my Italian. He is not someone who likes to talk garbage, but his German is good enough he does not have to resort to that. He is just not fluent yet. But when he tries to do anything in German, from buying a railway ticket to asking a question in orchestra rehearsal, he has almost no room for mistakes, or even slight hesitation. Within no time, his conversation partner will switch into fluent English instead of slowing down their German or switching out of Austrian dialect. Which is ok for the railway ticket booth, but gets a little old in orchestra, where people know exactly that he is living here, and even, in principle, want him (and every other foreigner) to learn German. In practice, he gets almost no chance to recuperate from even a small mistake in a German conversation. It doesn't even take a mistake: When he does not hear something properly, say, because of background noise, his request for a repeat will be enough to tip the conversation into English.
There are many reasons for this: People are proud of their English skills and want to use them; they feel awkward speaking high German; they may just be in the habit of switching into English, for other non-German speakers they know; and no, it is not their job to teach anyone German. And of course, language goes the path of least resistance. When what you want to do is "communicate", all you care about is how to convey your point most efficiently with the means you have. But the bottom line is that it is difficult for Steve to improve his German. Because people simply
switch whenever there is a communication problem, they are not used to
slowing down and "cleaning up" their native language - dropping the
dialect, slang, slurs etc., almost every Italian I met did this - and they have little patience with anything short of complete fluency. Because I realize that I am at fault for some of these points, too, we have decided to make Thursday the day I speak no English. Telling people around us about this has helped a bit, especially those who know us have been a little more patient on German day. But boy, sometimes I almost wish people's English wasn't as good.
Moral of the story? Steve will keep marching on until people give him credit for his skills, and I promise to honor German day as a belated wedding vow. I'll tell myself that I'll brush up my Italian for the next trip (and have to admit at the same time that this is about as high on the list of priorities as learning Spanish was when I moved to Tucson). And finally, this is my advice for any English speaker who is serious about learning another European language: Stay away from the German speaking countries. Go to Italy.
Moral of the story? Steve will keep marching on until people give him credit for his skills, and I promise to honor German day as a belated wedding vow. I'll tell myself that I'll brush up my Italian for the next trip (and have to admit at the same time that this is about as high on the list of priorities as learning Spanish was when I moved to Tucson). And finally, this is my advice for any English speaker who is serious about learning another European language: Stay away from the German speaking countries. Go to Italy.
