The Curious Case of German "Mobbing"

If a German tells you that he was mobbed, try not to look too horrified. He probably wasn't pummelled into the ground by a horde of rabid yobs. What he's most likely trying to convey to you is that he has suffered an incidence of bullying. Not a pleasant experience, for sure, but it creates a far less violent image in one’s head than "mobbing".

Mobbing is another case where an English term has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into German. And it didn't only lose the fight, but also its original meaning. In German, Mobben/Mobbing is used for all manner of bullying, be it at work, at school or in one’s personal life, regardless of whether the perpetrators are a pack of club swinging thugs ganging up on someone in an alleyway or whether it’s one single, mean-spirited person orchestrating a slur campaign behind the victim's back.

I've not yet been able to figure out 

a) why another word was required for something for which plenty of German words already exist, for example (and depending on context) schikanieren, drangsalieren, hänseln, nötigen, triezen, zwiebeln, (jemanden) fertigmachen, ausgrenzen, verekeln, the list goes on...

b) why, if the existing possibilities did not suffice, it had to be an English word 

c) why they picked the WRONG English word 

The noun (das) Mobbing, or, alternatively (das) Mobben, as well as the verb mobben, were added to the Duden (the most authoritative German dictionary) in 1996.

Curiously, the Duden also features the compound noun Mobbingberatung, meaning “a professional counselling service for those affected by Mobbing”. I'm guessing the reason for this is that Mobbing's primary connotation is with psychological harassment in the workplace, with the aim of making someone resign from their job. 

I don't endorse bullying in any shape or form, but I wouldn't be surprised if this phenomenon was much more common in Germany compared to other countries like the US and the UK, since it is nigh on impossible in Germany to fire an employee on a permanent contract, even if they deliver a performance that would make an arthritic sloth blush. See here for an amusing blog post which puts a bit of a dent in the myth of "German Efficiency".

  

Why Terrible Books Can Be Terribly Useful

I’m 14% into Doce años y un instante by Anna Casanovas. It's awful. A romance novel of the sickliest kind. It's so predictable it hurts. The characters are plastic. A special kind of plastic that drips marshmallow juice. The male protagonist conforms to a long list of clichés - troubled boy breaks girl's heart, joins army, becomes "a real man", returns to put things right. In the meantime, his rejected love interest straps herself into a girdle to keep her feelings in. Because women suffer and men do stuff, right? Like I said, I'm only at 14% and I can already tell that it can only get worse. A whole lot worse.

The cover should have warned me - I swear,
I did't see it at the time when I bought this!
...and ... uhm ... "Casanovas"...?

I blame Amazon. It runs a daily special offer called “Kindle Flash”, which is rather a mixed bag. Sometimes I get lucky and fish out an excellent read, but this one's very much at the soppy bottom mingling with the sticky wrappers of half-liquefied cough drops. All I can say in my defence is that the summary sounded so much less painful than the reality. 

The author is quite enamoured with her creation. She has gone the extra mile to put the reader "in the mood": Every chapter starts with lyrics lifted from a famous love song. She has collated them all on a Spotify list, asking her readers in the preface to listen to these while reading.

But Simone, I hear you ask, why the hell are you reading this drivel in the first place, and why oh why are you whining on to us about it!?

A valid question. And you already know the answer to that one, don't you? The reason I'm persisting with this cheese fest is the language. And, in particular, the dialogue.

You see, when trying to internalise a language, I believe it is important to read widely and not limit oneself to the usual genres. I may really enjoy biographies of 19^th and 20^th-century scientists, historical novels and the occasional self-help book on how to improve my time management skills (my chances of turning myself into a 19th-century scientist are marginally better), but these don't do much for improving my witty chatting capabilities. 

For furthering conversational repertoire, you just can't beat novels set in the here and now, laced with everyday conversations centred around people's emotional debris and, dare I say it, a dash of hum-drum domesticity thrown in. Romance novels, as much as I abhor them as a genre, are great for this. 

Despite having lived in Spain for nearly half a decade and having had thousands of conversations, I still have so many aha! moments seeing written dialogue. Just today, for example, I learnt that "tres [meses] a lo sumo" means "three [months] at the most". How could something so basic have escaped me until now?! 

The Different Types of Multilinguals

The Silver Spoon Multilingual

The lucky bastard was born right into the Holy Polyglot Grail full to the brim with grammar broth and vocab wontons. He doesn’t even have to tilt his head back to imbibe the linguistic manna. Spawned by parents of different nationalities, he grew up on three continents and has been tended to by a string of imported nannies. He burbles away blissfully in five languages before he’s potty trained.

How to spot: Oh, don't bother looking for him, he'll stand out wherever he goes. And don't feel bad - he's been created for the sole purpose of making you jealous. Not even his farts have a whiff of an accent, FFS!

The Hawker

To him, language is but a workhorse. He is the used car sales man of the multilingual world. He’s in love with making a sale, not the language. The language is merely what gets him there. The hawker exists in many guises: He could be selling leather bags on a beach or be the CEO of a multinational conglomerate.

How to spot: Just aim straight for his Achilles heel and watch him fall. You’ve surely met that hotel receptionist who, at first, seemed like he was fluent in six languages, but when you tried to talk to him about anything non-hotelrecpetionisty, he drew a big fat blank. 

The One With The Itchy Feet 

He'll suddenly announce that he's taking up sticks. His family stare at him in wide-eyed incredulity, his friends are aghast. A job offer he couldn't refuse? A whirlwind romance with an exotic minx he charmed in a chat room...? No and nope. He fabricates some story about being fed up with the weather and needing a change of scenery, blah blah, because he knows that nobody is going to take "I'm going because I just need to learn X language" seriously. While everybody's still scratching their heads, he's already off to the airport with a one-way ticket in his backpack and no plans to return for Christmas.

How to spot: Look for the foreigner who shuns his compatriots as if they were maggot-infested weasels and only hangs out with the locals. 

The Hermit

This one hardly ever leaves the confines of his bedroom. Give him a break, he’s only fourteen. If he had friends, he would try to impress them with his language skills. He has no friends because he tries to impress everyone with his language skills.

Should you ever get the chance to approach such a specimen on one of his rare forays into the real world, do not, I repeat, DO NOT make the mistake of calling him a “polyglot”. That would be far too pedestrian and bound to offend his sensibilities. He’s a “hyperpolyglot". You have been warned. 

How to spot: On YouTube. He’s made 15,000 videos of himself rattling off rote-learned scripts in 35 languages which have 0.5 views between them. 

The Lingacademic

After somehow managing to spend 79% of his formative years supertuning his epiglottis on the international student exchange circuit, he will eventually scale far enough up the linguistic syntax tree to call himself a real university-cultivated linguist with enough letters after his name to have exhausted an entire alphabet.

How to spot: Appears to be listening attentively to what you’re saying, but is, in fact, silently (or not so silently) correcting your grammar and/or listening to the Italian family arguing at the next table. 

The Impostoglot

He’s almost always a native English speaker whose entire foreign language repertoire consists of two dozen loose words and six phrases, half of which contain the word “beer”.

No matter which country he’s in, he will claim, without batting an eyelid, to “speak the lingo”. Why, he actually believes that he does! He manages to maintain his delusion because, whenever he goes about peppering his speech randomly with his paltry, mispronounced melange of scraps, the targets of his efforts prefer to humour him quietly instead of catapulting him out of his ignorance. 

In the rare cases when he does become aware that communication isn't actually happening, it's because they have a heavy accent. 

How to spot: In a bar, yelling “una biérrraay per favore!”

Bavarian Authors And Surprise Discoveries

I try not to buy paper books anymore. Too heavy, too inconvenient, too demanding of shelf space. Considering my relapse rate, I'm just glad I'm not a crack addict. This week I picked up this little gem from the gift shop at Nymphenburg Palace (Munich):

It’s an anthology featuring 19^th and 20t century Bavarian Women Writers. I’m not quite sure which component of this book I love more – the short stories/extracts or the condensed biographies of the authors that accompany them. I’d never even heard of most of these writers who, evidently, formed a pivotal part of the cultural and literary landscape of their time, and often at great personal cost.

One of the most disturbing biographical snippets I’ve come across so far (and I’m only on page 71) is from the life of actress and best-selling author Wilhelmine von Hillern, born in 1836.

Aged just 17, Wilhelmine, neé Birch, becomes involved with theatre critic Hermann von Hillern. Shortly after discovering that their dalliance has not remained without consequences, the couple marries. However, this isn an era when any perceived infringements of society's strict moral code could lead to irreparable repercussions, and Wilhelmine’s mother fears that the swiftly drawn veil of holy matrimony won't suffice to safeguard her family's reputation. Not only does she impel the family to keep the birth of the child a secret, she also forbids her daughter to breastfeed her son, while squirting laxatives down his hungry little throat. Her plan is to pass off the emaciated child as a pre-term baby conceived in wedlock a few months down the line, but it all ends in terrible tragedy. 

Wilhelmine's intense feelings of guilt over the death of her infant son permeate deep into her body of work, and there is no doubt that the need to process this harrowing experience is part of what makes her one of the most compelling writers of her generation.

Change of topic. Kind of. A few days ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I’d let my study of French go to pot this summer. On second thought, however, I’m very much enjoying this current burst of exploration of the culture I was born into. And where better to engage with it than in situ, immersed as I am in the rural Bavarian summer with its long muggy days, surprise thunderstorms and the constant howl of combine harvesters droning on in the background? 

I’ll get back to my daily French practice soon enough. Sometimes I need to remind myself that it's perfectly OK to suspend one set of language activities for a while to make room for another. As long as the pursuit yields new insights and personal satisfaction, why go and ruin it for myself with a guilty conscience?

Not Lost But Omitted From Translation

Sitting on the train in Munich yesterday, I payed closer attention than I normally do to the warning notice aimed at dissuading fare dodgers (Schwarzfahrer). I noticed that the text had not been translated in its entirety into the other languages.

[To make it easier to read, I've cut the French and Italian texts from my rather blurry photo and just left you with the original German along with the English translation]

As you can see, in the translation(s), the notice limits itself to stipulating the amount of the fine (€60) you will incur if you are caught without a valid ticket and the legal ramifications. The original German text, however, contains two extra sentences (highlighted by me) which are... how to put this delicately... bordering on the contemptuous:

Whatever reasons you may cite [for not having a valid ticket], there is no excuse which we haven't already heard before. We know them all, and none of them are going to wash with us. 

I wonder why they did not translate this part. It wasn't for lack of space, that's for sure. Were they, perhaps, worried that the condescending tone might ruffle tourists' sensibilities...?


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After publishing this post, a fellow blogger sent me this image, which was part of the 2014 campaign against fare evasion run by the Berlin Transport Company:

"Fare dodgers are getting ever more daring"

When A Change In Routine Wrecks Your Multilingual Practice

A break from the daily grind is a good thing. But not, as it turns out, for my French. I had promised myself I would, at the very least, listen to a French podcast every day, but, as usual under altered circumstances, I’ve done diddly squat.

I’ve been on semi-vacation at my mother’s place in Germany for just over one month now, with two weeks to go before I return to Spain and resume my normal life, which includes a weekly French lesson, French conversation group on Wednesdays and, of course, a daily drip feed of podcasts.

My Portuguese is also suffering. I’ve not been reading any Portuguese books lately, focusing instead on Spanish and German ones. Because, let’s face it, reading in languages you’re competent in is 100% pleasure and 0% effort, and this fits in very nicely with my being in lazing-about mode. Having said that, I’m still exchanging emails, albeit sporadically, with my friend and Portuguese teacher. These take me an embarrassing amount of time to write, but it's totally worth the effort as it keeps the language in the weekly mix, so to speak.

Spending such a large chunk of the summer removed from my usual environment drives it home to me once again just how easy it is for languages to fall by the wayside. Without the force of structured daily discipline behind me, a language that isn't integrated into my life in some meaningful way just slips down the back of the mental sofa. For me, the hook that keeps a language anchored firmly in my little sandbox is being able to use it with people who are close to me. 

French is by far my weakest language and therefore most at risk from (temporary) abandonment and rapid erosion. At present, chatting away in French with native speaker friends is still a distant dream. And the more I neglect my daily practice, I realise, the more distant it becomes. 

Well, no point whining... time to hatch a French-resuscitation plan… watch this space!

Foreigner Beware Of Crinkly Forehead

A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor's. It was a big event for me. I'd never been in need of medical attention before. Not in Spain, anyway. I'm of robust design, you see. I don't pander to fancy foods that can't be eaten with a spoon and I don't get illnesses that can't be cured by an aspirin. However, a rebellious mole on my back was starting to morph into an octopus and it needed to be stopped by a professional.

Health centres are confusing places. I glanced around in a daze for ages until spotting a desk with a person who wasn't either bellowing into a phone or being harangued by a patient-staff scrum. I approached the woman stationed there and told her that I had an appointment at 11:30. Turns out that this was the desk where you make appointments and not the desk where you go when you already have an appointment. Once this was clarified, I asked her where I needed to go next. Up to the third floor, she said.

I followed her directions and arrived in a big central waiting room surrounded by four walls with lots of doors with names on them. Only then did it occur to me that I was missing a vital piece of information.

I returned to the desk lady for help. "Sorry," I said, "I don't actually know which doctor I'm supposed to be seeing. Could you tell me their name, please?"

And there it was.

The dreaded Crinkly Forehead.

I repeated my query, only to be met with yet more crinkles towering over a blank stare. I asked again. The crinkles assumed attack formation. I tried once more, in really simple Spanish, words spaced at one second intervals (I've had some practice at this, as you can tell). I repeated my question three more times. Still nothing. In an act of desperation, I grabbed a pen and paper from the desk and wrote it down. Finally, the name of my physician was divulged.

The most flabbergasting aspect of Crinkly Forehead is that it can spring into action BEFORE verbal communication even has a chance to commence. This happened to me in my local phone shop. As I handed my phone to the girl and drew breath to ask if she could please top it up with twenty bucks, I found myself confronted with a quizzically cocked head disfigured by crinkle over crinkle over fucking crinkle! They were humping each other, I swear! Then they called for re-inforcements and a bundle of veins as thick as anacondas after a meal of jungle elephants joined the wrestling match and... Christ, I did not know that the rosy baby bottom face of a twentynothing could even do that!

I'm guessing her inner thought process must have gone something like this: She looks like a foreigner, so whatever she is going to say will be incomprehensible. But I will try to help, because I'm a good person. But... what if she tries to make me speak in English?!?! Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God! I've only studied it for ten years at school, I can't say a word!!! What am I going to do, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?! At this point, she reaches the conclusion that it's safest just not to understand anything.

The Crinkly Forehead is the nemesis of every language learner, tourist, or foreigner in general. It is the iron curtain, the NATO missile defence shield and the wall Trump is gonna build all rolled into one.

Once the contortions commence, once you spot the merest ripple, the slightest tell-tale twitch in the face that may have been smiling benevolently at you just a heartbeat ago, dear language learner, you are doomed. It is the manifestation of Blue Screen of Death in a real live person. A re-boot can only be effected once the obstruction has been removed, and the obstruction, my hapless foreign friend, is YOU.

Attempting to engage with Crinkly Forehead is not like flogging a dead horse. It's like flogging all the sausages, lasagnes, burgers and chicken nuggets that its macerated remains found their way into, expecting the clapped-out old mare to re-assemble and run the Grand National. It ain't gonna happen. No chance. Go home. Talk to Siri.

I, my dear people, will be talking to my mole. At least it is forthcoming, if only with tentacles.

Getting My Bavarian On

Barbara Engleder won gold for Germany in Rio yesterday in the women’s 50m rifle three positions event. After being declared winner, she went totally berserk, crashing to her knees, beating her chest, the ground and the air with her fists and hollering victory at the top of her lungs.

Although this exuberant display of emotion may have been a tad out of the ordinary for a German athlete, there was something even more striking about what happened next.

In the post-competition interview, in which Engleder explained her joyous outburst as the need to release the build-up of tension, she spoke in the broadest Bavarian imaginable. 

My mum was aghast during the entire news report, while I stared at the screen with bemused incredulity. We are both native Bavarian speakers, to be sure, but there is a widely held consensus across Germany that dialects are only to be used in informal situations, e.g. with friends and family, but NOT in formal settings like TV broadcasts or job interviews.

On such high-brow occasions, you are meant to speak Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which every German can understand. By switching to dialect "inappropriately", the speaker risks coming across as an uneducated, uncouth hillbilly*. Or worse, a farmer. 

For the past few years, whenever I’m on a home visit, like I am right now, I make a concerted effort to stick to Bavarian as much as possible, even with strangers in shops and restaurants, as long as I think that they, too, are Bavarian.

I generally find that the reception to my speaking Bavarian is overwhelmingly positive, with most people replying in the dialect without raising an eyebrow.

If there’s one advantage to getting older, it’s that you care much less about what people think of you. So what if anyone takes me for a barn-raised redneck? 

I’m really enjoying putting a conscious effort into expanding my Bavarian vocabulary. I’ve learned at least a dozen new words this summer already. My home village is a rich picking ground, and people of the older generation are particularly rich source of terminology, which is fast falling out of use. It pains me having to watch my very first language dying a slow death. (I did not start to speak Hochdeutsch until I went to kindergarten). But who knows, now that I have an Olympic gold medallist on my side, maybe there's still hope?

[Click here to listen to an interview with Barbara Engleder]

(*Hinterwäldler in German).

Lost For Words - Why My German Sucks

My mother just can't help herself. She had to slip in another comment about the frightful gaps in my  vocabulary. We were having coffee at her friend Maria’s house yesterday when, recounting an anecdote, Maria mentioned the German word for ‘fairground ride’, and I remarked that I couldn’t remember having heard that term before. There was guffawing and stares of disbelief. How can you not know that?! Last week, there was a similar incident on the train with Mum berating me for failing to recall the word for (railway) sleeper.

My pointing out that, in fact, I do know what things are called, but... in English, does nothing to mellow maternal consternation. 

I guess it’s hard for her to understand my predicament. It’s just one of those things you don’t really get unless it happens to you.

Mum spent all of her 65 years immersed in the language of her native country, listening to German, reading in German, thinking in German, speaking nothing but German. I’ve had less than a third of that time to assimilate my mother tongue. Much of the passive vocab, which I once possessed as a teenager, has slipped into oblivion during the past quarter of a century of living abroad.

I also made the fatal mistake of not reading any books in German for two decades, which must sound paradoxical to anyone who knows how much of a bookworm I am. Since moving to Spain five years ago, I have been trying to remedy this sad state of affairs, and I have the Kindle archives to prove it.

I do know where my mother is coming from. I, too, took my German for granted for far too many years, never making an effort to maintain, expand and update it, believing that it would always be there for me, held in suspension, pristinely preserved, like a pickled marsupial in a museum display cabinet. But nope. It’s very much a case of “use it or lose it”.

The Multilingual Thing - Why Does It Even Matter?

Who hasn’t been shaking their head, on occasions, over people waxing lyrical about the most pointless of pastimes? But then, who's to decide whether something is worth getting excited about or whether it's a total waste of time? 

In the end, I would argue, it's all down to your chosen perspective.

You could look at it like this: In another four billion years or so, the sun will run out of fuel, it will explode and wipe out our solar system. And since we can barely get off this rock - and certainly not far enough away from it to reach and wreck some other beautiful planet - we’ll be done for. In the face of this inevitable event, what does anything matter? Football, saving humpback whales, getting junior to eat his broccoli, fashion, music, gardening, knitting sock puppets, building a log cabin in the woods with your bare hands – it's all equally pointless in the (very) long run, why invest effort and energy in anything if it will all end up burnt to a crisp?

Actually, I find the thought that we're all just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic strangely comforting. Even at the risk of fucking up royally, you might as well try to cultivate yourself a nice little obsession, since, ultimately, you’ve got no more and no less to lose than anyone else. 

My personal take is that what matters most, while we’re all hurtling towards our chargrilled finale, is what gets us fired up as individuals. The scope ranges from pleasing solely oneself to enriching the lives of others. Maybe we should aim for a bit of both?

We all find different things rewarding, it’s as simple as that, and it’s more about how we cultivate our interests, rather than what they are. If what's keeping us back is the fear that the choices and sacrifices we make in pursuit of our foibles will seem ridiculous to others, then we wind up in a lose-lose situation: we won't be able to pull off the causes others deem "worthy" for lack of emotional impetus and commitment, and neither will we succeed at what we actually do care about if we keep our hooves glued to the starting blocks.

When, about three years ago, I mentioned to a group of acquaintances that I was going to start learning Portuguese, one of them said, "Oh, yet another language you won't ever need." ¡Caramba! What the hell does this person know about what I need or what may or may not be useful to me? 

We don’t choose our passions. We find them – or, as some airy fairy tree-hugging folk would argue, they find us – and they ignite us, often for unfathomable reasons. They can crack open doors that would otherwise have remained firmly closed to us. If we are passionate about something, it makes us feel connected – to our own selves, to other people, to the world around us – and without that connectedness, we cannot function effectively as human beings. 

So, I thought, what could be a better place for doing verbal cartwheels around one of my most enduring passions than a brand new blog? 

I want this blog to help me reflect on my (at times a bit chaotic and unstructured) multilingual life, turning it into a more conscious and productive experience. I want to go on improving my skills and better integrate my thus far rather poorly developed, peripheral languages, Portuguese and French, more tightly into my everyday life. I also want to record some of those curious language-related daily incidents and insights before they evaporate into thin air. Maybe, I'm hoping, these will resonate with someone else out there…?

That brings me to the other main point of this blog: connecting with people for whom language is not a mere technical tool located in the arid, strategising parts of their brains, deployed on a strict communicate-or-starve basis. For some people, and I count myself among them, languages go so much deeper, they are an integral part of who we are and by merging with new ones, our consciousness expands, we encounter parts of ourselves we never knew existed, and this makes us grow, evolve and change. It is this emotionally-centred, experiential dimension of multilingualism that is to be the heart of this blog.