When people throw things at me and call me an uncultured shit - which happens frequently while shopping, hiking, and vomiting in public - it sometimes occurs to me that they're wrong because I'm bilingual. Being bilingual is a rarity in today's America, where most people don't even speak one language, and instead manage to eke out a parody of communication through a series of grunts and gestures.
Today, I can sort of read a German magazine and can carry on a German conversation. I can sometimes follow German TV or radio. When I lived in Luxembourg in 1998, I even watched Alf in German. Get this: the German word for Alf is "Alf."
It wasn't always so rosy. I started learning German in high school, where I was taught how to tell people my name, how to ask where the disco was, and how to inquire as to whether or not Mrs. Schmidt was at home. At first, I didn't understand everything. I didn't get that when my teacher said "Pass auf," she was requesting our attention rather than our unconsciousness. But it got easier, and I slugged through it. By the time I graduated high school, I was able to determine the whereabouts of the train to Berlin, what Wolfgang and Helga were doing after school, and at what time we would be invading Poland.
So, when I got to college, I was okay but not great. I figured I'd take my required two more quarters of German language, and then begin the arduous process of forgetting all of it.
College German required a lot of partner work, and my partner was a freshman named Jim. We were told to introduce ourselves to each other over and over and to tell each other our ages and to inquire whether or not the other liked sauerbraten. When we learned a new construction, we were told to create sentences using that construction. If we didn't know how to say something, we were allowed to ask, but had to do it in German using the phrase 'Wie sagt man...?" It all made me mentally tired - as if I was going to pass auf.
Once, deep in the midst of an assignment on relative pronoun phrases, we walked over to our T.A. to ask a question.
"Ja?" she said.
"Wie sagt man 'pistol-whip'?"
She didn't understand, so I pretended to beat Jim with the butt of an imaginary revolver before repeating the question.
" 'Mit einer Pistole schlagen.' "
Jim tried it out in German. " 'The man, who is wearing the blue hat, is pistol-whipping Tony Danza.' " He nodded. I thanked the T.A. and walked away.
More questions arose as we continued with the assignment. "Wie sagt man 'flesh-eating bacteria'?" Jim asked later.
"Wie sagt man 'break-dancing fiasco'?"
"Wie sagt man "David Bowie's hairdo'?"
By the end of the session, we were turned around on the German language. We were further turned around when the T.A. brought in a popular German CD for our listening enjoyment. On the cover were four very white people in ostentatious studded sunglasses and various ridiculous hats - a hip-hop group by the name of "Die Fantastischen Vier," or "The Fantastic Four."
"Isn't that a group of superheroes?" Jim asked.
The album turned out to be brilliant, and thanks to my increased skills, I was able to easily translate the lyrics ("The Smudo, the Smudo, I am the Smudo. I don't know Karate and I don't know Judo."), which made me feel smart. I took the borrowed DFF album to the deli I worked at and played it loudly and proudly.
My boss, Ryan, was intrigued. He said that he only knew two German words. One was "dankeschön" (which he, like everyone else, mispronounced as "dunka-shane") and the other was "lederhosen."
"What does that mean, anyway?" he asked.
I knew that "hosen" meant pants, but the other half of the word had me mystified. So I pulled out my dictionary and looked it up.
"Here it is," I told him, running my finger down the page. "It means 'unfortunately.' "
"So 'lederhosen' means 'unfortunately, pants'?" he said.
"I guess."
"As in, someone puts pants on their head instead of a hat and you point out their error by saying, 'Excuse me, but unfortunately... pants.' "
I agreed that this was odd, so I asked my T.A. She was still afraid of me after the pistol-whipping incident but informed me that although "leider" did in fact mean "unfortunately," "leder," which was correct, meant "leather."
"Dunker-shane." I told her.
Her wariness of Jim and me did not improve with time. We were scheduled later in the day to perform a dialogue for the class about a campus issue. We had chosen the oft-lamented parking problem.
"There aren't enough parking spots here," I began, speaking in German.
"Yes. Yes there are not," Jim agreed.
"There should be more."
"Yes. Yes there should."
"What if there was less parking?"
"That would be unfortunately," Jim said, capitalizing on what we had learned about leiderhosen.
"But," I pointed out, "that would mean more room for a..." I paused, then turned to the T.A. "Wie sagt man 'Taco Bell'?"
" 'Taco Bell,'" she answered.
"That would mean more room for a Taco Bell," I told Jim.
"We should no parking places, and Taco Bell make," Jim agreed.
"But what of the commuters?"
Jim rubbed his chin. "They need parking places?"
"They need."
"We could kill all of the commuters," he suggested, nodding.
"But what would we do with the bodies?"
"We could throw them in the river."
"Ah," I said, nodding back. "Yes. Let us eat tacos."
We looked to the T.A. when we had finished. After a silent pause, she slowly offered one criticism. "When you talk about throwing the bodies into the river," she explained, "you should say 'in den Fluß,' not 'in dem Fluß.' Using dative case implies that you aren't throwing bodies into the river, but are instead standing in the river and tossing them around."
"That's what we meant," I said.
"Like a Frisbee," Jim added, doing a pantomime for emphasis.
By the time I went to Luxembourg, I was set. I knew how to explain my tossing of bodies. I knew about Die Fantastischen Vier. And fortunately, I knew about my unfortunate pants. Which is pretty essential to getting the attention of Germans, as it turns out.
