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I love the German language.
I won't lie, I decided to study German pretty much on a whim. The Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, my particular undergraduate college within Northwestern University, requires that all students demonstrate a level of proficiency in a language other than English before graduating. In middle and high school I studied Latin, five years of it, up through the Advanced Placement test on Vergil's Aeneid (because there are two Advanced Placement tests for Latin, of course. Unlike actual living spoken foreign languages, which only deserve one.) I didn't do well enough on the AP to pass out of the requirement entirely, but I could have taken a test to rectify that and, at worst, had to take a quarter or two of remedial Latin to be done with the whole thing.
That didn't appeal to me, however, so as my freshman year came to a close I debated what language I would begin studying the following Fall, knowing full well that whatever I chose I would have to stick with it for two years in order to fulfill the conditions set forth by the school. Many of my friends -- many, many, MANY of my friends -- were studying Japanese. And there was certainly something appealing about that. I am not one of those geeks with a particular fetish for Asian culture and Japan in particular, but certainly there was something to be said for being able to watch anime without subtitles, not to mention gaining insight into a culture that will likely play an important role in world economics and leadership for the remainder of my adult life. Of course following that argument to its logical conclusion we should all have studied Mandarin, which is why Mike Downey is the smartest person ever. But I digress.
Japanese seemed like a lot of work to me. Among other things learning to speak it involved learning not just one but three completely new alphabets, one of which contained tens of thousands of characters. Even at that early stage of my college career I was already becoming thoroughly allergic to real actual work and so I elected to go for something simpler. New alphabets were right out, as was Swahili, another popular choice at Northwestern, because I am painfully white and also had and have no particular desire to spend much time in sub-Saharan Africa. But why I settled on German in particular I'll never know. Given my Latin background it would have been sensible to pick a Romance language, but I didn't. I know I was resistant to French and Spanish, because everyone learns those in high school and then goes on to not speak them very well. German just seemed like the logical choice, even if it was selected in the absence of logic of any kind, or any amount of great thought or consideration.
It turned out to be serendipity of the best kind, a match made in heaven. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I had an exceptionally good teacher. For my entire first year of German, three quarters, I studied under the inestimable John Paluch, also known as Herr Johannes Paluch, the elder statesmen and study abroad advisor of the Northwestern German department. This was also a happy accident on my part. I was fairly lucky with registration times going into my sophmore year, and thus had my pick of the German sections. I selected the one around lunchtime, rather than one first thing in the morning, and thereafter made having Herr Paluch as my teacher a priority during all subsequent class registration periods. Herr Paluch was dynamic and fun, and he was also thoroughly immersive; I don't believe he spoke a word of English my first day of class, and he spoke it maybe once a quarter at most, and always begrudgingly and out of absolute necessity.
Perhaps it has something to do with it German's inherent similarity to English, or perhaps my mother is right and I have an under-utilized gift for language, or perhaps it was just the power of a good teacher, but I took to the German language immediately. I learned it without studying too hard and discovered a love for it that abides to this day. It is rich and quirky and endlessly fascinating, with words that render the sweetest notions into angrily-shouted consonants and condense the most volatile concepts into an economy of language that rolls off the tongue. Kindergarten. Zeitgeist. Gestalt. Ausgetzeichnet. Verboten. Schadenfreude. Angst. Nirgendwo. Blitzkrieg. Doppelgänger. Weltanschauung.
My current favorite is Zugunruhe, which translates literally as travel unrest. But rather than referring to anxiety about travel, its a particularly poetic term about the tension caused by not travelling when one is restless, the affliction of wanderlust unfulfilled. It was coined to refer to symptoms exhibited by migratory animals, especially birds, when they are prevented from migrating. I know instictively that antsy feeling of knowing you ought to be on the move but aren't, knowing you ought to be somewhere else, or at least heading somewhere else, but instead are left agitated and uneasy as you are forced to linger. But to my ear it sounds much nicer rendered in a compound four-syllable German word. That's probably because I love the German language, and miss wholeheartedly the practice of speaking it aloud.
I won't lie, I decided to study German pretty much on a whim. The Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, my particular undergraduate college within Northwestern University, requires that all students demonstrate a level of proficiency in a language other than English before graduating. In middle and high school I studied Latin, five years of it, up through the Advanced Placement test on Vergil's Aeneid (because there are two Advanced Placement tests for Latin, of course. Unlike actual living spoken foreign languages, which only deserve one.) I didn't do well enough on the AP to pass out of the requirement entirely, but I could have taken a test to rectify that and, at worst, had to take a quarter or two of remedial Latin to be done with the whole thing.
That didn't appeal to me, however, so as my freshman year came to a close I debated what language I would begin studying the following Fall, knowing full well that whatever I chose I would have to stick with it for two years in order to fulfill the conditions set forth by the school. Many of my friends -- many, many, MANY of my friends -- were studying Japanese. And there was certainly something appealing about that. I am not one of those geeks with a particular fetish for Asian culture and Japan in particular, but certainly there was something to be said for being able to watch anime without subtitles, not to mention gaining insight into a culture that will likely play an important role in world economics and leadership for the remainder of my adult life. Of course following that argument to its logical conclusion we should all have studied Mandarin, which is why Mike Downey is the smartest person ever. But I digress.
Japanese seemed like a lot of work to me. Among other things learning to speak it involved learning not just one but three completely new alphabets, one of which contained tens of thousands of characters. Even at that early stage of my college career I was already becoming thoroughly allergic to real actual work and so I elected to go for something simpler. New alphabets were right out, as was Swahili, another popular choice at Northwestern, because I am painfully white and also had and have no particular desire to spend much time in sub-Saharan Africa. But why I settled on German in particular I'll never know. Given my Latin background it would have been sensible to pick a Romance language, but I didn't. I know I was resistant to French and Spanish, because everyone learns those in high school and then goes on to not speak them very well. German just seemed like the logical choice, even if it was selected in the absence of logic of any kind, or any amount of great thought or consideration.
It turned out to be serendipity of the best kind, a match made in heaven. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I had an exceptionally good teacher. For my entire first year of German, three quarters, I studied under the inestimable John Paluch, also known as Herr Johannes Paluch, the elder statesmen and study abroad advisor of the Northwestern German department. This was also a happy accident on my part. I was fairly lucky with registration times going into my sophmore year, and thus had my pick of the German sections. I selected the one around lunchtime, rather than one first thing in the morning, and thereafter made having Herr Paluch as my teacher a priority during all subsequent class registration periods. Herr Paluch was dynamic and fun, and he was also thoroughly immersive; I don't believe he spoke a word of English my first day of class, and he spoke it maybe once a quarter at most, and always begrudgingly and out of absolute necessity.
Perhaps it has something to do with it German's inherent similarity to English, or perhaps my mother is right and I have an under-utilized gift for language, or perhaps it was just the power of a good teacher, but I took to the German language immediately. I learned it without studying too hard and discovered a love for it that abides to this day. It is rich and quirky and endlessly fascinating, with words that render the sweetest notions into angrily-shouted consonants and condense the most volatile concepts into an economy of language that rolls off the tongue. Kindergarten. Zeitgeist. Gestalt. Ausgetzeichnet. Verboten. Schadenfreude. Angst. Nirgendwo. Blitzkrieg. Doppelgänger. Weltanschauung.
My current favorite is Zugunruhe, which translates literally as travel unrest. But rather than referring to anxiety about travel, its a particularly poetic term about the tension caused by not travelling when one is restless, the affliction of wanderlust unfulfilled. It was coined to refer to symptoms exhibited by migratory animals, especially birds, when they are prevented from migrating. I know instictively that antsy feeling of knowing you ought to be on the move but aren't, knowing you ought to be somewhere else, or at least heading somewhere else, but instead are left agitated and uneasy as you are forced to linger. But to my ear it sounds much nicer rendered in a compound four-syllable German word. That's probably because I love the German language, and miss wholeheartedly the practice of speaking it aloud.
