What I Talk About In German Book Club Whether I Want To Or Not

"What are the different words for 'testicles' in German"?

It's about five minutes before the close of this week's book club session when this question drops. Reproductive body parts did not feature this afternoon, neither in the book we've been reading, nor in any of the tangents the group discussion has gone off on. There are always tangents. But nobody does tangents quite like Horacio.

After a year and a half of weekly meetings - and Horacio never fails to show -  I'm still trying to get used to his non sequiturs. "Hoden," I tell him, "and the most common colloquial term is  'Eier', just like in Spanish: 'huevos' (eggs)".

He can't help it, you see. On the bell curve of neurotypical, he takes about the same position as Pluto does in our solar system: Way, waaaaaay out there. There's no guile in him (at least that's what I like to think), but he sure keeps me on my toes.

"Premature ejaculation," he blurts out in a session not too long ago while the rest of us are engaged in philosophical musings on the meaning of freedom,"How do you say that in German?" All eyes are on me, the only native German speaker present. My group mates try their hardest not to crack up. There's relief on their bemused faces - at least it's not them having to satisfy Horatio's thirst for knowledge.

On another occasion, Horatio desperately needs to know whether "[insert a term that can only have found its way into his vocab courtesy of frauleindoesfrankfurt.com]" was a common way of saying "to ejaculate" in German.

Curiously, when we are actually working up a sweat on our way through a racy passage and I'm in a BRING-IT-ON! frame of mind, ready to Bavarian-dialect-coach the entire cast of Ready Steady Fucktoberfest, Horatio chooses to keep shtum like a fish. I count my blessings, but deep down I know he's just waiting for the next time when we'll be comparing German vs. Spanish cemetery etiquette or examining the Teutonic penchant for separating trash into umpteen different categories. He's all for delayed gratification, our Horacio.

Want To Get Better At A Language? Just Ditch It For A While!

I've been back in Spain now for two weeks. And I've noticed a difference. A difference I'd read about. A difference other people had told me about. A difference I'd never really been conscious of myself before.

I suddenly feel a lot more at home in Spanish. The gap between what I want to express and what I can express has noticeably shrunk. The right turns of phrase come to me much more readily when I need them. I'm still not 100% there, but getting closer. It's only taken me... uhm... half a decade.

Most surprisingly of all, my French has also improved. Before my summer break in Germany, and after battling with the language for a year already, I was still virtually mute. I'm pathetic like that. I hate getting things wrong. I want to speak in well-constructed sentences. Or not at all.

So, on Wednesday, after having abandoned my French for the past two months, I dragged myself to my weekly French conversation group. I didn't want to go. I went only because I had promised Cristina, our formidable chieftain that I would be there, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

My performance was, as expected, as disastrous as ever. This prompted me, while the rest of the group were chatting away, to message Miranda, my French teacher, to fix an appointment for the next day.

It was in this 1-2-1 session, where we both noticed an improvement, Miranda and I. I seemed to catch much more of what she said, and I actually TALKED. Poorly, for sure, French people would have pelted me with mouldy madeleines for what I was doing to their language, but there was a conversation happening, and this was a bit of a break-through for me. For some reason, I felt less inhibited, more gung-ho about it all.

A friend of mine had once remarked to me how his Chinese took a leap forward every time he returned to China after a period of absence. I remember this comment because I thought it odd at the time. Surely, you'd be nothing but terribly rusty?! Never mind having missed out on weeks' or even several months' worth of exposure and learning experiences! How can a break from immersion possibly be beneficial...? It makes no sense. The brain works in mysterious ways...

Do You Get Paid More For Being Multilingual?

When I was fifteen, a friend's mother, a French professor at a US university, made a comment that stuck with me. She said that foreign languages, in the world of work, weren't worth a dime. Unless you had to offer something else besides, preferably a solid set of technical skills.

At the time, I didn't really comprehend the significance of this statement. All I knew was that I liked languages and that I wanted a job where I could use them. Mme Professor was right, of course. When I was job hunting just a couple of years later, I found out very quickly that nobody will employ you just for being a linguaphile. Speaking more than one language is not a guaranteed route to a well paid job. Or any job.

Now, in the course of my higgledy piggledy professional life, I have indeed been paid for being multilingual, but only once I had half a decade of work experience under my belt. It was at the tender age of 21 when I managed to land a job with an international travel and financial services company who paid a bonus for each language its employees could communicate in. In the beginning, my department was small and buzzed with the fun we all had chatting to the different corners of the world, often rescuing distressed customers who had been robbed of all of their belongings. But after a few years, the operation morphed into one of those behemoth call centres with the tasks becoming ever more mundane. I felt like an automaton hooked onto a headset and taking call after call after call. The personal touch, as well as the gratification factor that came with seeing a complicated mission through from beginning to end, were lost and so I left.

My next position was as a Braillist for the RNIB (Royal National Institute for Blind People) who also paid a language skills supplement. The objective was to transcribe a wide range of printed materials, including text books, magazines and exams, into Braille. Before being eligible for the extra pay, I first had to learn Braille and then pass tests in the language-specific Braille codes, the training for which was provided in-house. Oh, I loved that job - imagine being paid for reading books all day, I was in heaven! - but I eventually quit when, due to a regulation change, we were consigned to spend our waking days transcribing gas and electricity bills and very little else. I was bored shitless. That was not what I had signed up for.

In my experience, bonus payments for language skills are rather rare. Most of the time, foreign language requirements - no matter whether they are an "essential" or a "desirable" part of a job spec - do not translate into a neat, quantifiable wad of dosh that rolls into your bank account at the end of every month. However, if you have the skills for the job, being more than monolingual can give you the edge over another candidate, as well as widening the choice of jobs you can apply for.

If anyone has any opinions or experiences to share on this topic, I would sure love to hear from you.

Recommended Reads: What Language Do I Dream In? By Elena Lappin

I love to read about multilingualism. It’s not so much the academic side, which intrigues me the most, but the personal account of the experience. What impact does living one's life in multiple languages have on a person's sense of self, on their relationships with others? What rewards and difficulties do people face as a consequence of moving within several cultures? Under what circumstances did they acquire their languages, and how do they keep them alive and vibrant?

Yesterday I finished reading What Language Do I dream In, by Elena Lappin, who speaks six languages (or more, I may have miscounted), five of which are central to her life. As a serial immigrant, she has lived in seven countries and currently resides in London.

Lappin speaks to her parents in Russian, to her brother (who's a German writer) in Czech and to her children in English and Hebrew. Her early attempts to raise her first son in Czech, which she had long considered “her” language because she spent a good chunk of her formative years in Czechoslovakia, failed, since family ties with the country had eroded over time. A mother tongue spoken only by the mother, it seems, is not enough to make it take firm root in a child.

In this evocative memoir, besides tracing her convoluted family history, the author describes her inner struggle with choosing the language she could finally realise her dream in: becoming a writer. In fact, which language to write in, rather than dream, becomes a personal as well as a professional quest.

Counter-intuitively, Lappin choses neither her first language and mother tongue, which is Russian, nor her beloved Czech, in which she says she has always felt truly at home, but English, the last language she learned to speak competently when she was already an adult. And although her story is as different from my own as could possibly be, I can very much relate to this part.

As an aside, the author represents someone I’ve referred to as a “Silver Spoon Multilingual” in a previous post. Funnily enough, one of the chapters of the book is entitled “Silver Spoon”. Her silver spoon, though, doesn't have much to do with her multilingualism, but concerns an actual silver spoon with an engraved name that she does not recognise at first sight, but which turns out to be a Russian version of her own name. 

My rating: 9/10.

I think this is a fantastic read for everyone who's fascinated by the multifaceted reality of multilingual living, including its emotional dimension. The only part, which I perhaps didn't relish quite as much as the rest of the book was the last four chapters, in which the author goes into minute detail about her efforts to disentangle her complex family history. She doesn't manage to get me to care about these ancestral characters as much as she does about the still-living members of her family. On the other hand, her profound need to investigate her roots is precisely what gave rise to this great book in the first place, so fair dues.

Getting Back to Normal Life

I'm back in Spain after seven weeks of home leave in Bavaria. Great though it was to spend time with family and reconnect with old friends, part of me has been anxious to return to my routine. Anxious, in particular, to shuffle both French and Portuguese, which had been brushed to one side over the summer, back into the mix.

In an effort to resuscitate my derelict French, I've signed up for busuu.com (the free part). At rock bottom level. A1. This is just too easy, I'm thinking, as I whizz through the first section, and then I spell je m'appelle with one "p". Not so easy after all. A couple of episodes of dailyfrenchpod.com are meant to help me muster up the courage to re-instate my weekly 1-hour-long French lessons. I think I'll give myself another week's respite.

French conversation group starts again on the 13th. Cristina, our fierce and dedicated group leader, has maintained WhatsApp contact with me over the summer, maybe because she senses that I might jump ship at any point. She keeps us on a tight leash. That must be the reason that this group has been going for years, instead of disbanding after six months, as most of them do. Kudos to her.

On the Portuguese front, I'm watching kids' cartoons over lunch and I've received an email from my long-suffering Portuguese teacher. I've been ordered to her house for tomorrow morning. I already know what she's going to say about my deteriorating Portuguese, and it won't be flattering. I'll be armed with Austrian chocolates and a short essay which I'm going to write today. I'm also going to tell her that I've booked a weekend trip to her home town, Lisbon, for October.

Das Mensch

If my grandmother refers to you as "das Mensch" two things are certain: you are female and you've pissed her off.

If you know a bit of German, you may be confused. Doesn't Mensch mean human being? How can that be an insult?

Some of you will also be questioning the use of the neuter article "das". Mensch is a masculine noun, so shouldn't it be taking the article "der"?  Well, it's precisely the strategic deployment of the "wrong" article which turns an innocuous human being into a slur.

Just a couple of days ago, I stumbled across a definition, of sorts, in an anthology of Bavarian women's writers I had bought recently (click here for a post on this book). See below for the relevant passage.

Source: Von Menschen, Menschern und einem Abendrot, by Margaret Kassajep (1916-2008), published in Bayerische Schriftstellerinnen

So, the upshot is that, in southern Germany, das Mensch is a traditional derogatory term referring to women and girls of suspect morals. Nowadays, it's roughly equivalent to the b-word, but perhaps a tad less strong.

My granny simply labels any woman she doesn't like as das Mensch. Which, in her case, applies to pretty much any female she's ever met. She doesn't like men much either. Or, in fact, anyone who happens to fall under the wider category of der Mensch.