Germany

May 10th, 2005

I’m off to Germany soon for a wedding and I’ve decided that it would be helpful to reawaken my long standing struggle with learning a foreign language.

German is a favourite due to my delusion that it’s an easy one to learn. Unfortunately it’s not an easy one to remember without constant use.

I can count to ten, I can say “Where is the thermostat?”, I can say “I love you” and I can also say “I love sausages”.

I found a book called ‘Learn to speak german in six weeks’ at the back of a shelf the other day. Despite only having three weeks to spend on it, it has helped me to add the following phrases to my ever expanding vocabulary:

- “No, unfortunately not”
- “What do you do?”

The phrasebook tried to teach me many more than that but the only ones that have taken hold in my head are the ones above. It’s interesting that the way I learned the ‘unfortunately not’ one was by the book’s choice of example.

“Are you Boris Becker?”
“No, unfortunately not”

A beautifully surreal conversation snippet that sticks in the head and refuses to budge. None of this uninteresting ‘Where is the restaurant?’, ‘Over there’ nonsense here.

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