Classes

Hello again, cats and kittens. My Thursday morning DaF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache [German as a foreign language]) class doesn’t start until next week, so if I can just fight my way through a couple of hours of German Political Thought later this afternoon I will be cleared for the weekend.

Max: Yeah man, gonna be scot-free and 21 in Berlin! Gonna get nuts! I am feelin’ so crazy I think I might learn how to count to 20 in French this weekend!
Rube: Whoa bro hold up a second, think about the future, don’t you wanna have kids someday?
Max: Screw you, Buzzkill Jones! Wild and loose from dusk ‘til dawn! Forget the future! I wanna purchse, write, stamp, and mail some POSTCARDS to my FRIENDS & FAMILY, and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop me!
Rube: Max this isn’t fun anymore.
Max: Whatever, man! I’m gonna go catch up on my blogging and get another facebook photo album up if it KILLS me!

Gonna be a massive Wochenende (weekend), I can already tell.

Jeese Louise, my blog is only caught up to the end of last week—you folks have no idea how my classes are going! I haven’t taken a lot of photos during class so these descriptions will be solely textual. I’ll try to squeeze in some pictures that don’t fit in the photo essay portion of this update.

Having a car in this country takes a lot of time and effort and an incredible amount of money but I think this little Porsche would be worth it.

My Monday morning course, and the only one that meets more than once a week is French 1-A-0 (French for Dogs and Babies). There are probably 15 or so people in the class, maybe half of whom have obviously had a least a little bit of experience au François, the other half being heavy-tongued cretins like myself who can barely say “crepe.” Our professor is an extremely patient, sincere German man named Hartmut who speaks beautiful French and has worn the same awesome blue-n-gold cable knit sweater both times the class has met. I hope it is his French Instruction sweater. I spent the first couple of classes having extremely basic conversations, learning the conjugation of etre (“to be,” spelled here without the required “^” over the first e because I don’t know how to do that) and regular verbs, and writing down the dozens of random vocabulary words, special accent marks, and kooky, wildly inconsistent pronunciation rules that Hartmut has to teach us in order to say anything at all. It’s not too bad , really just what I expected; learning a language form scratch takes a lot of time and patience and repetition, and it works a particular part of my brain that has been pretty much dormant since I got a handle on German in high school. Pronunciation has definitely been the hardest part so far. As my friend Johanna—who spent last semester in Paris, ooh la la—tells me, one must train a whole new set of facial muscles to speak French properly. Unlike German, which you can just usually plow through as long as you hit every letter, French words are defined by a bunch of subtly differentiated vowel sounds that make my face sore. BUT, as long as I don’t get embarrassed about it and keep talking in class I know I will sound like a lazy, snooty coward in no time.

Two more points of interest and I will stop talking about French (I apparently have a lot to say about it?):
1. As I am taking French in Germany with a bunch of internationals, our lingua fraca, and language of instruction, is German. My flashcards have French on one side and German on the other, questions are answered in German—German is the safe haven for once, the comfortable place to be. I’m sure this is flexing all sorts of unique languagey neural nets, but what I’m most interested in is the effect it will have on my accent: will I speak French with an American accent, with a German accent, or with some mangled American-accented German accent? I put my money on the latter.
2. French is alien and strange, but at the same time kind of eerily familiar because it has so much in common with English. A lot of important nouns, which are totally different in German, are spelled exactly the same in French—page is “page” and not Seite, for example, and person is “person” instead of Mensch. I like to complain about French’s silent letters and weird, you-just-have-to-know-them exceptions, but of course English is even worse with the subtle gradations and easily broken rules. I suppose I’ve gained some sympathy for people who learn English post-childhood, and some gratitude for having such a difficult yet versatile, useful, and overall great language for my mother tongue.

God I am a nerd. Let’s move on before this turns into a polemic about the really important importantness of foreign languages.

After French I biked over to the less delicious but more convenient Mensa (student cafeteria) down the block and ate a very large, cheap plate of potatoes, rice and baked zucchini with tomato sauce and sunflower seeds. It was weird but I was hungry.

I headed back to the IES center to do some unnecessary worrywart administrative scrambling (I failed to sign up for some classes that it turns out I didn’t need to sign up for in the first place? I don’t know, it all worked out), then rode around in the sun for a half hour or so before rolling to my next class, The Großstadt (big city) in the Weimar Republik. In selecting my German literature class I had specifically avoided Vorlesungen (lectures)—as they apparently consist of a professor standing at the lectern and reading his notes to hundreds of kids crammed into a crumbling lecture hall—in favor of a smaller, more interactive Seminar (seminar—come on), but the first meeting of this course was not exactly intimate. Maybe 40 students were packed into this mid-sized room to listen to our wheezy professor’s fairly interesting background of German film in the 20s. The class was generally reluctant to contribute, probably due to insecurity about their German. One know-it-all girl in a ponytail probably did about 80% of the talking. I made one comment that he pretty much ignored, but at least I said something. Anyways: it is a lit class, and a film class, and I can only see it getting better from here. I could have taken a class on Goethe’s natural philosophical poetry, but I’m a busy guy, you know?
Finally, just yesterday I had my first session of my most interesting-sounding class, Professional Translation Skills: Fachsprache (jargon, or technical terminology)—Economic and Technical Translation. The description is in English so I’ll just lay it on you verbatim:

In this practical course, students interested in specialised translation as a professional activity will have an opportunity to develop their initial translatorial competence in this field by working on texts from key areas of economics and technology. The course aims to sensitise students to linguistic and textual dimensions of scientific and economic discourse in English and German and will also provide an insight into procedural aspects of specialised translation such as researching the source text, employing translation tools within the translation process, developing and managing databases for terminology and quality control.

Doesn’t it sound super-great? No, you say? It sounds sort of boring and intimidating? Well, I relish a tedious challenge, and I laugh in the face of boredom! Also the gentler, media-focused translation class for wimps met on Fridays, and I would rather manage a terminology database than give up my three-day weekends.

The schedule said 14 o’clock, so I got to class at 2 pm on the dot, which is to say a quarter of an hour early—nearly every single college course in Europe starts 15 minutes late and ends 15 minutes early. I suppose there are ostensible scheduling reasons for this but it is really probably so because Europeans are lazy and need that extra time before class to smoke and sip espresso and that extra time afterwards to smoke and sip white wine. ANYWAYS, I was there early like a dork, and also like a dork I got all anxious when nobody else showed up until they actually had to be there. I had rechecked my schedule three times and actually CALLED A FRIEND to ask her to check online for me when 14:15 rolled around and the rest of the class strolled in, all nonchalant and espressoed up.

And what a group it was! I’ll start with the professor, because he’s a pretty good tragic figure/straight-man foil for the rest of my wacky classmates. Picture it: Michael Davies is a tallish Englishman with patent leather loafers and thinning hair; he is of medium build but gives the impression of being slight and sort of barely there, like a light breeze might take him out the window. He has long fingers and a very gentle, mildly humorous British accent. He would be an excellent choice to narrate Roald Dahl books on tape. His German is refined and easy, and somehow pitched even higher than his English. Prof. Davies used to work in the Translation Department at Humboldt until it was dissolved—he barely parted his tented fingers and characterized the decision as “ridiculous” in this ever-so-slightly huffy tone that I found pretty funny—and now he is some sort of marginal adjunct surviving on the ragged edge of the English Department, teaching English-German translation to whoever will listen. Yes, I am extrapolating wildly, but that doesn’t make it not true. Outside of being an easily-mockable Englishman Professor Davies seems kind, thoughtful, and very good at what he does, and I’m really looking forward to learning what he has to teach about translation.
But of course it wasn’t just me and Mikey D in that busted-down classroom; I had four other classmates, each nuttier than the last!

Actually three of them were pretty equally nutty: in the rear left corner a cluster of three Italian girls sat nattering in Italian until M. Davies asked them for a little background. Then they broke out the tortured, off-balance English, with some stray German mixed in. From what I gathered they were MA students in Germany for some reason, and this course filled some requirements for them. So in conclusion they sound super engaged and totally ready for a German-English translation course. I look forward to talking some circles around them.

The disinterested Italians with poor German and worse English were pretty funny, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the rear right corner. A large woman in her mid-30s with a tiny baby strapped to her chest informed us in flat but proper English that she currently worked as a translator and was here to get a little practice and feedback. Michael Davies spent a few minutes trying to convince her that this was really more of an introductory class, and we would be covering a lot of basics, and would she please leave and take her loud child with her (he wasn’t allowed to say the last part but you could tell he was thinking it), but she was adamant. Sitting next to her was a young man with a huge, unkempt, crazy-person beard, and a little potbelly, and bulging eyes held open so wide that you could see white all the way around the iris. He had the best response to MD’s “Who are you and why are you here?” query. “I’m just this guy,” he told us in the American accent I’ve become so attuned to, “just here to look after the baby.” (Why the husband/conspiracy theorist baby-daddy didn’t just stay home [or like, in the hallway] with the child was never made clear.)

The rest of class played out as you might expect: Prof Davies soldiered through his opening spiel on technical translation, one of the Italian girls pronounced “CEO” like “seeyo,” the baby made 3 or 4 fusses, and at one point Beardy Magoo hijacked the discussion of resources for translators and spent 5 minutes rambling about old, legendary editions of Webster’s and (somehow) a dubious alternative history of American jurisprudence. Michael Davies was a real trooper about all of this. I’ll get as much out of this class as I want to, which is quite a bit.

OOF. So, those are my courses in a little over 2000 words. I’m gonna publish this now and then get cracking on the photo-driven portion of this update. Until then, consider this:

Crossing the street while running stories:

1. Every time I want to run to/in the park I have to cross the major street in front of my apartment building. I was waiting to cross and it was cold outside so I did some jumping jacks at the crosswalk, and a middle aged dude cruising by in his Mercedes honked and gave me a thumbs up. This is the second thumbs up I have received from a stranger while exercising. I guess the Germans just love physical fitness.

2. The next time I came up to the same crosswalk with a little momentum and I jaywalked really blatantly in front of this man, his wife and maybe 4-year-old daughter. He looked real indignant and yelled something at me as I went by, like “Hey, way to be a role model!” As delicious as the irony would have been had he hit me in front of his young daughter and given her a real role model for social interaction, it also would have hurt to bleed out of my face, plus I was in a hurry, so I kept running instead of yelling back at him. In a surlier, less harried scenario I could have started jogging in place and hollered the following three points at him in German:
a. Raise your kids and I’ll raise mine.
b. Jaywalking is awesome.
c. Do I look like a role model?