Multitasking and finding my home!

I'm killing two birds with one stone!

Yeah, I know, it's a terrible metaphor (the French version d'une pierre deux coups -- literally "from one stone two hits" -- at least has the advantage of increased vagueness on what you might be hitting with rocks), but however you say it, I've had a bit of success lately doing it.

One of my chronic problems is that I have way more projects that I want to do than I have time to do them, and it doesn't help that I keep taking up additional homey hobbies like balcony gardening, homemade sushi, and organizing my basement.  (Actually that last one is finally pretty much done, yay!!)  So I have to multi-task!

One successful example is the French yoga class that I've been taking for more than three years now.  We actually speak a lot of French at home (and we've increased it recently to keep the kids in practice), but, still, it's helpful to have a weekly opportunity to converse with a group of native-French-speaking ladies my own age.  (And I do mean ladies -- even though the class is not intended to be gender-specific, I've never seen a man attend, not even once...)  And with this side of conversation practice comes, obviously, all of the benefits of an excellent yoga course!

And what's that other language I need conversation practice in?  Oh yeah, German!

I tried taking a German-language yoga class for a while, but, really, how much yoga do I need?  Plus, I constantly felt self-conscious because the teacher explained to the whole class that she was holding the class in High German instead of Swiss German for my sake, and even then I could barely understand what she was saying. This interfered with my ability to focus on doing yoga.

So I hit upon the idea of taking a German conversation practice!  I got the idea from the German camp I attended two summers ago with my family.  The daily intensive course I took there kind of put me off wanting to take any more German language courses (it was the first time the teacher had taught German to adults -- I don't want to go into too many details, but the course left something to be desired).  But the conversation practice at the beginning of each course was excellent.  Extremely helpful.  The teacher gave us just enough topic-finder games to get the conversation ball rolling and then sat back and took notes on all of the mistakes we made.  Afterwards we would go over the various errors and discuss how we could and should have said things better.

The multi-tasking idea I had was that a conversation class in Zürich might double as a kind of group therapy.  As I've complained before, nobody understands my peculiar relationship with my various countries.  Not even fellow expats, really.  But maybe in a group of other people living in Zürich and struggling to get some German practice, some people would feel the same strange sense of being at home with always being a foreigner.

To clarify the problem a bit, it drives me nuts when acquaintances blithely refer to the US as my "home." Here's an actual conversation I once had:

Swiss guy I know: (catching me in the hall, to another guy) Yeah, Carol's American...

New Swiss guy: (to me) Ah, and where's your home?

me: (after thinking about it for a bit)  Here.  In Zürich.

(Swiss people all laugh!)

New Swiss guy: No, I mean in the US!

me: (thinking: WTF?  *sigh*)  I'm from Minneapolis.  It's North-central.

That's how I generally answer when people ask me where I'm from and clearly want to hear a location in the US as an answer.  This happens to me all the time.

When people ask me a more open-ended "Where are you from?" I generally answer "It's a long story..." -- which is a lot more accurate that simply saying "Minneapolis."

The thing is that -- while my family has settled pretty permanently in Minnesota -- we didn't even move to Minnesota until I was ten years old.  I was born in the Chicago area (and I have family roots there), but I have never lived there past babyhood.  I've also lived in New York, Ohio, Utah, and -- adding it all up -- I've actually lived in New Jersey for almost as long as I ever lived in Minnesota (and have family roots there too).  And that's not to mention the fact that I've lived the most recent quarter of my life in Europe, including seven years in France, and I am currently raising my little French family.  Yet I still get people asking me "How often do you go home?" -- when in context they clearly mean "How often do you visit your family in Minnesota?"

Just a few weeks ago, a colleague of my husband mentioned that he'd heard something about Los Angeles and had immediately thought of me.  The conversation topic changed before he could finish his story and explain if there was any reason to actually connect it with me, but I doubt there was.  Behind my polite smile I was thinking, "I have never been to Los Angeles.  I've only visited California at all a handful of times.  Surely you must know someone else who would be a more relevant association when you hear something about LA..."

The weirdest one was this one time in the train, though.  It started because my kids were chattering to each other in English, as they always do.  (Damn kids, always talking to each other in their perfectly American accents -- they keep blowing my cover!)  Anyway, some lady overhead them and asked me where they were from.  I answered "France."  Totally true, BTW, but that's not what the lady wanted to hear.  So after a bit of exchange, I admitted that I'm from the US.  The lady then launched into the longest story you can imagine about how she'd once been an au pair in Texas, and all about the kids she'd taken care of and what they're up to today and all of her attempts to reconnect with them on Facebook, and what she's doing herself these days (she mentioned several times that she's a lawyer), and all the places she'd visited when she was an au pair, etc.  It went on for literally twenty minutes with me making the most minimal polite responses of the "that's nice" variety.  My husband, who had his back to her, was making when-is-this-going-to-wrap-up? kinda faces, and my kids were clearly wondering the same thing.  I was busy wondering: Do all of the Americans you meet get treated to this story?  We're not exactly rare, you know...

I don't have a problem with telling people I'm American.  The problem is that that's not the whole answer to the question "Where are you from?" -- and the people asking the question aren't even interested in hearing the whole answer.  It would be so much more pleasant for everyone involved if people would stop expecting that the question should have a simple answer for me.  That's why it's my dream to one day speak German so well that people won't be struck by the impression "Isn't it cute that she's trying to speak German!" and immediately ask me where I'm from.  Like it was in France.

Of course I expect that I will always be more foreign here than I was in France because the Swiss don't really have the same idea that one can become Swiss -- unlike the French and the Americans where (for the most part) if you adopt the language and culture, you're in.  (Note:  I actually have dual citizenship with France.  I also have a great-great-grandmother from Switzerland, if that counts for anything...)

But that's OK.  And after 12+ years in Europe, I'm practically as much a foreigner in the US when I go back there as I am a foreigner here in Switzerland, and that's OK too.  I now have three cultures where I'm both an insider and an outsider, and my kids are in the same boat.  That's just our life.

And that's the second task I was kind of hoping to get out of my conversation practice -- to connect with fellow insider-outsiders about all of that.  Kind of a tall order, I know.

Mostly I've had to accept that my expectation was unrealistic.  The conversation practice course has been extremely helpful to me, especially in terms of motivating me to formulate my thoughts in German on a daily basis and practice communicating in German in real time.  (I'm now at the point where I can carry on an elaborate conversation in German for more than an hour without any serious difficulty (as long as the other person would rather speak to me German than English or French), as I discovered in a random daily situation earlier today.)

Still, I think the course is a little too structured for my taste.  The teacher asks the students a fixed set of questions, and -- while the questions are fairly open-ended -- each student is only allowed to respond for a short time, in order to ensure that everyone gets enough opportunity to speak.  We're also not really encouraged to respond to what other students say or to ask them follow-up questions, for the same reason -- not to cut into another student's time interacting with the teacher.

But now that I think about it, I think I liked the style of the conversation practice back at German camp better, where the teacher gave us free reign to chat with the other students and discussed the corrections with us after the fact.  I'm attending a top German language school in the area, and it's clear that they put some serious effort into constructing plenty of questions and vocabulary lists and role-playing scenarios.  Yet sometimes less is more.  It's great to have all this stuff on hand for when the conversation is at a lull.  But it would be more interesting if they would give us the vocabulary list and let us try to have a normal conversation.  We're all grown-ups and can be reasonably expected to give others a turn to speak.  It makes sense for the teacher to intervene when someone is having difficulty getting to speak and/or when the conversation dies, but otherwise set it in motion and don't fix it until it's broken.  It's not necessary to have the teacher initiate every exchange.

For a recent class, I thought of a funny anecdote on that session's topic, and I imagined how to recount the whole story in German.  As you can see, the motivation itself was helpful even though I knew I almost certainly wouldn't have the opportunity to recount my anecdote in class (and I was right).

Due to scheduling constraints, I have to take a few weeks off from my conversation training, and yet -- crazily enough -- during my last session I almost got what I was hoping for.  Our group that week had a good rapport, and the teacher mostly let the conversation wander.  It wasn't as free-form as I would have liked, but more fun than usual.

After that class it hit me that I'm simply signed up for the wrong class.  There are probably plenty of people who like to have such a structured conversation practice, but that's not what I'm looking for.  Fortunately there are loads of German language groups in classes and groups in Zürich.  Maybe I can find one in my neighborhood and kill three birds with one stone by also making friends with neighbors and connecting better with my community...

Wish me luck!!

Always learning: Austria edition, part 1!

Do you ever have one of those moments where you learn a new thing, and immediately realize "Duh, that was obvious... Everyone else probably already knew that... lol"

If you find experiences as entertaining as I do, then I recommend learning new languages and visiting new countries!  And if you read the title of this post, you're probably thinking "Well, Austria isn't that exotic..." -- which is what makes it all the more amusingly ridiculous to discover my own misconceptions!

Here's an example:  Before I moved to a German-speaking region (five years ago), I didn't know what "schnitzel" is.  I'd heard of "wiener schnitzel" and I knew that "schnitzel with noodles" was one of the von Trapp children's favorite things.  Now, everybody knows that wieners are, like, hot dogs. So, if I thought about it at all, I guess I assumed that schnitzel was a dish somehow involving wieners and pasta.

(Note: It was only maybe fifteen years ago that I learned what "pesto" is, same for "wasabi" -- and Germanic cuisine is simply not as popular as Italian or Japanese.  My dad likes to tell tales of his first encounters with that crazy new foreign dish called pizza.)

Imagine my surprise when I learned (a few years ago) that schnitzel is, in fact, a thin slab of meat, generally served breaded!  Then one day, in a German class, the teacher asked the students to give an example of a dish that is typically German.  One student piped up with "Wiener schnitzel."  This response surprised the teacher, and she explained that wiener schnitzel is typically Austrian, hence the name.

"Wiener" = from Wien, where Wien is the German name for Vienna (that is, it's what the people in Vienna call their city).  This was a duh! moment for me because I'd always known that hamburgers and frankfurters were named after Hamburg and Frankfurt respectively, and I even knew about "Berliners" (thanks to a famous JFK speech).  But I somehow had never made the connection that "wiener" isn't just a random word for sausages, it means "from Vienna."  This is probably mostly because I had no idea it was called "Wien" until I recently started learning German.  (I like "Vienna" better anyway -- sounds more elegant, don't you think?)

And I learned a bunch of other silly stuff during my recent visit to Austria, which I will tell you about in upcoming posts! :D

Back when I was still living in France, I came up with this theory:

learning a new culture tends to merely increase your mental "us" category, but doesn't stop you from stereotyping other other groups. It helps, but learning a new culture doesn't automatically confer some sort of blanket enlightenment.

And now that I'm learning another other culture, I realize how right I was.  By learning to be French, I kind of thought I was learning Europe in general, and I was right to some degree.  But it's also true that I was learning the culture and history and tradition and trends and attitudes of the francophone world -- and learning German has been like opening a window on a whole additional, unfamiliar world; making it no longer foreign to me.

In Austria, we had one dinner one night with my husband's German colleague (the person we were there to see), and we got to talking about how in both Switzerland and Austria the locals are perhaps even more hostile to immigration from Germany than they are towards non-German-speaking immigration, for fear of cultural imperialism (or something) from their big, powerful neighbor to the North.  (See here, for example.)  The colleague explained that, since Germany is so much more populous than Switzerland and Austria, naturally, as people move around, there will be a lot higher proportion of Germans in Switzerland and Austria than there will be Austrians and Swiss in Germany.  (If you assume that, say, 1/3 of the residents of each German-speaking city came from some other randomly-chosen German-speaking city, the Hamburgers will perhaps hardly notice the presence of so many Frankfurters, whereas the Wieners are sure to notice that so many of these new residents are not Austrian.)

He's right, yet I found his assumption quite interesting -- that among the major German-speaking cities/regions of Europe, there's obviously going to be a lot of mobility, and that moving across a national boundary is ordinary, whereas crossing a language boundary isn't.  I totally agree -- not just from having done it myself, twice, but also from hearing from French-speaking Swiss people who have moved to this side of the Röstigraben.

(Next up:  tales of my trip to Austria!  Stay tuned!)

For want of a common language

Most of the ladies in my French-language yoga class are French, but some of them are from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. To give you an idea of how close Swiss-French is to French-French, one of the Swiss ladies mistakenly thought that one of the other Swiss ladies was from France -- and this was after being in class together for several weeks, with plenty of conversation before and after class!

One of the Swiss ladies told me just a few weeks ago that she'd lived in Asia, but moving to the German-speaking part of Switzerland was a bigger challenge culturally (and was viewed as a bigger adventure by her friends and neighbors of the French-speaking region).

Why?

Here's another quick story to illustrate:

A friend of mine was waiting in a chaotic line, and since it wasn't moving, her husband took the children to wait somewhere else. Another lady immediately moved up to squeeze my friend out of line. When my friend indicated that she was still in line, told her she wasn't standing in line properly.

"Oh, and squeezing right up against each other is going to make it go faster," my friend replied.

"This is how we do it in Switzerland, and if you don't like it, you can just go back to wherever you came from," was the reply.

Note that this conversation actually took place in German (my friend's native language), and my friend never stated that she wasn't Swiss. Of course, she didn't have to.

[Then another lady (a lady my friend had assumed was German since she'd been speaking perfect high German earlier) suddenly switched to Swiss German to dispute the other Swiss lady's claim about "how we do things in Switzerland."]

Switzerland has an extremely high proportion of residents who are foreigners. According to this website I googled, foreigners account for more than 20% of the population. That's a lot. It would be nearly impossible to avoid tension between the foreigners and the native citizens.

However, I think the problem is exacerbated by having an official language (for all important business, official documents and instructions, etc.) that is not even mutually intelligible with the local dialect. It's like if you had to learn Italian for all formal communication, but the locals would all speak amongst themselves in French. Swiss German -- this so-called "dialect" of German -- is nearly that distant from High German.

If you don't believe me, take it from this Swiss comic book (Jetzt Kommt Später, by Kati Rickenbach):

The biggest problem with this, in my opinion, is the psychological distance it creates between the locals and the foreigners. The locals learn High German in school (essentially as a foreign language), and it's totally normal that they would prefer to speak their familiar native language. But there are huge barriers to learning Swiss German as a foreign language (it's not written, it's not consistent from one village to the next, it's hard to find materials and courses for learning it, especially if your command of German German is weak). So, effectively, the (German speaking) Swiss have their comfortable, familiar language for speaking amongst themselves, and then they have to switch to an uncomfortable, foreign language any time they want to communicate with a foreigner.

Communicating with foreigner becomes an annoyance, and even the most enlightened person is constantly making a mental distinction between "talking amongst ourselves" and "talking to them." It even contributes to a sentiment that Swiss people from other language regions of Switzerland are from a foreign culture.

German-speaking residents generally learn to understand Swiss German fairly quickly, but don't typically speak it -- so they are constantly marked as speaking the foreigner-speak. And I've heard credible arguments that the German-speaking Swiss feel more hostility towards Germans than towards any other (white) immigrant group.

Naturally, I intend to learn the local dialect. But the other weird thing is that a lot of Swiss people don't really want foreigners speaking their dialect. Many Swiss do -- there are plenty of people who feel that if you're in Switzerland, you should learn to speak like the Swiss. However, the particular dialect of Swiss German a person speaks is a strong marker of local identity. It's a way of telling people precisely where you're from. So trying to speak the dialect of some village that you're not really from sounds kind of weird and wrong to lot of people.

Personally, I think the solution is to stop the two-language system. Stop using High German** as the official language, and start using Swiss German as the official language of the Swiss-German-speaking part of Switzerland. Unfortunately, there's one big problem with that plan, illustrated here in a cartoon by Sergio J. Lievano:

The main reason Swiss German is considered a "dialect" (as opposed to being considered a separate language) is that it's not one language. It's a family of dialects that are (mostly, but not entirely) mutually intelligible amongst themselves. So it is impossible to agree on one official "Swiss German". It's so difficult that -- despite how fiercely the Swiss want to maintain their cultural independence from Germany -- it's simpler to just accept the foreign language rules from Germany than try and agree amongst themselves on defining Swiss.

[Aside: There was a humorous piece in the newspaper last week about how some Swiss people were up in arms over the fact that some foreign maps lumped together six different Cantons (the size of counties) as the "greater Zürich Area." Cantons that are outside of the Canton of Zürich -- can you believe it?! Meanwhile, plenty of people (my boss for example) commute into Zürich every day from neighboring cantons...]

However, I think it would be possible to agree to commission a committee of linguists from all over Switzerland to hammer out an official "Swiss German" language to serve as the official language (and just agree in advance to abide by what the committee comes up with).

If they created an official Swiss-German language, people could continue to speak the particular dialect of their home village. But people would also have the option of speaking a language that doesn't mark them as being from anywhere in particular -- and these two types of people would be able to communicate with each other in real time!

That's my humble proposal for improving inter-community relations in Switzerland.

**Technically the Swiss use a special version of High German, called "Schriftdeutsch" (i.e. "written German"), but it is nearly the same as the standard German language of Germany.

2011/2012 State of the me address

I was thinking of not writing a "state of the me" this year since I'm not feeling very ambitious this year, so most of my goals are of the "just keep swimming" variety. I want to work harder at helping my kids develop good study habits so that they'll eventually do their homework on their own -- plus I'm trying to encourage their independence in other age-appropriate ways, even when (or especially when) it's easier for me to do stuff for them than to insist they do stuff for themselves. I'd like to continue to get my stuff in order in preparation for moving to a new apartment next Fall. (I'd like to travel light through life, but the kids aren't always on the same page with me on this.) I have some things I'd like to write for Main Street Plaza, and I'm planning to attend Sunstone. And, as always, I need to keep studying German.

Anyone who follows this blog knows I'm always on about learning German. (Just click on my "German Language" label below!) So it seems like I should be done by now, right? It's frustrating that I've put other projects I care about on indefinite hold in order to devote more time to German, and it's still not "done"!

The other frustrating part is that I'd thought that once I got to this level (the level I'm at now), improving my German would stop being work because I'd be constantly getting German practice in my daily life. And it's true to a certain degree. I often read the free newspapers, and I always read all of the ads in the tram and at the tram stops -- and these items improve my vocabulary and my familiarity with different grammatical constructions. (Ads are very helpful because they often include wordplay.) But in day-to-day conversation, people are as likely to speak English or Swiss-German (Züritüütsch, specifically) as they are to speak high German, and the local dialect isn't really mutually intelligible with high German until you've reached a level of both that's... well, higher than the level I'm at.

These days, when I meet new people that I need to communicate with, the first question that comes up is language. Do I speak Switzerdeutsch? No? Shall it be high German, then, or English? After two years of working on this, I still can't just communicate and interact with people without this whole Ausländer! Foreigner! American! thing constantly in my face and everyone else's. It drives me nuts.

I don't mind being different, I don't mind being a foreigner, and I don't mind the fact that I don't always fit in, but I don't like the fact that the second I open my mouth, I get sorted into a little mental cubbyhole that I don't want to be placed in. And I'm tired of always having to make small talk about where I'm from. I don't want to be rude to people who obviously mean to be polite and friendly by asking, but I'm just tired of it. Sometimes I want to reply: What does it matter where I'm from? It's far from the most interesting thing about me...

Also (to make this post more pathetically self-absorbed than it already is) nobody understands why it bugs me. Seriously, nobody. My fellow foreigner-in-Switzerland friends are basically like Of course we always go around with the equivalent of a big neon "Ausländer" sign around our necks -- you'll be happier once you stop fighting it and just accept it. But I don't want to accept it.

The thing is that in France it wasn't like this. It was never like this in France. There I could define myself in my own terms. I feel like I lost something valuable in the move, and it's costing me a pretty penny to get it back.

I was trying to explain it to my Austrian friend the other day. I told her that in France, I would talk to people for a while, and they'd perceive that I have some kind of foreign accent, but it wasn't obvious where I'm from. People would try to guess, and they would essentially never guess correctly. This surprised my friend, and her surprise depressed me all the more. So my crappy German makes it hard for people to believe that my pronunciation in French is (or was? :,^( ) pretty good...? Lovely.

The German language itself is actually quite interesting. My goal for the year is to read all of Nouvelle grammaire appliquée de l'allemand avec exercices corrigés, and do all the exercises. I'd even call it fun if I didn't have so many negative/frustrating associations with the whole procedure. Plus I want to take an evening conversation course, to help me motivate myself to compose my thoughts in German.

I imagine that, once I'm ready to start learning some Switzerdeutsch, the whole procedure will become fun again. Nothing against high German, but on some level it feels like high German is something I have to do simply to get myself out of this hole and back up to ground level again, and then when I start learning the dialect, I'll be building something up. We'll see.

Wish me luck!

The Baby Jesus brings your Christmas presents...?

It's funny how the Christmas legends vary slightly from one culture to the next. In the US, the story of Saint Nicholas (who traditionally gave small presents on December 6) morphed into "Santa Claus" (via the Dutch "Sinterklaas") -- and moved some of his legendary gift-giving antics to Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, some cultures also have a legendary "Father Christmas" (a.k.a Père Noël or Babbo Natale) who has his own traditions, but sometimes simply merges with the American Santa Claus. But in some German-speaking regions, there's another legend that I find amazingly strange: the Christmas gifts are brought by the Baby Jesus (Christkind).

The Christkind doesn't have quite as elaborate a mythology as Santa Claus, but he is supposed to magically bring the Christmas tree and the gifts during the night on Christmas Eve. I've always been kind of curious about how this works, and I had the opportunity to ask some Austrian friends about it the other day. These friends have kids who are a little younger than ours, and still believe that the Baby Jesus brings their presents.

I explained to them the reason the tradition stuck me as so odd. In the US, there's a whole angst-ridden rite-of-passage when the kid eventually figures out that Santa Claus is just made-up, and then there's a big question (especially in religious households) of whether the kid will extrapolate and start wondering about Jesus. But in Austria, Switzerland, and southern Germany, when the kid figures out that the whole "Christkind" thing was just a story, put-on by their own parents... Well, you kind of skip that intermediate step of having to notice the parallel...

"It's European efficiency," laughed my Austrian friend.

But, seriously, if any believing Christians practice this custom, that has got to be one surreal discussion when the kids figure it out.

"That part about angels announcing Jesus's birth in a manger, that's totally real. The part about the Baby Jesus bringing you presents on Christmas? OK, we admit we were making that up and faking it. But the stuff about Jesus walking on water and rising from the dead? That part is totally real..."

So, how was German camp?

Here's the latest escalation in my ongoing battle with the German language: I packed up my whole family to Germany to spend our vacation on three weeks of German camp!



In case you're asking "Wait, don't you already live in a German-speaking country? Why do you have to travel to have a German-language immersion?" -- allow me to review. The problem with Zürich is they speak a flavor of German that is impossible for foreigners to learn without first learning German German. And everybody in Zürich speaks English anyway. So -- while I speak kind-of OK German -- I haven't felt confident enough to inflict my terrible German on unsuspecting Swiss people. Instead we've saved this fun for the Germans!

On the down-side, the camp kind of reminded me of that song "Camp Grenada." Particularly the line where they sing "...and they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining." I'd packed mostly Summer clothing (being as it's July and everything), yet the first week was unexpectedly chilly. Then the second week was even chillier, with occasional rain. But it didn't really start raining in earnest until the third week.

Then (while I'm on the complainy part), there was the food. My husband was already leery about the food when I first suggested this trip. ("Three weeks?? You have no idea how terrible the food is in Germany!") I then recounted that conversation to my boss (who is Swiss). He asked me what part of Germany it's in, and when I said it's near Köln, he immediately said, "Oh, the food is really terrible there! Oh... I mean... It's not so bad..." Anyway, with that introduction, the food at camp exceeded our expectations. Tragically. Picture a cuisine that's already not much to write home about, then imagine how it might be prepared by a school cafeteria for kids.

That said, I don't want to complain too much about the food because overall the camp was great fun, and we got a ton of good German language practice and instruction. And by the third week of people complaining, the food improved considerably. Either that or we just got used to it. My husband was only subjected to the first two weeks of it because he had a conference to attend, lucky bastard.

On the positive side, it was fun for the kids to get to attend the same school as their parents! After they divided us into classes, I told Léo that I'm in the same class with Daddy, and Léo immediately said, "I hope you get to sit by Daddy!" So cute! Naturally, why would he imagine that the grown-up classes would be any different from the classes for kids? He also assumed we'd be needing scissors and a glue-stick for our class...

Decountrified!!!

When we last left our little tale of my crazy international life, I admitted to passively letting people in Paris believe I was Swiss, mostly just because I like to keep people guessing. Well, be careful what you wish for!

I've been learning Italian for almost as long as I've been speaking French -- and I've gotten to the point where I can read simple books and carry on a rudimentary conversation in Italian -- but I've never gotten really fluent in Italian because I've never spent more than a few weeks at a time in Italy (and even then, I haven't gone far off the tourist-beaten track).

But that's OK! Because at Lago Maggiore (as I mentioned earlier) most of the tourists are Italian, French, German, or Swiss. So if you start speaking to someone in Italian -- even if they sense that Italian is not your best language -- they can't simply switch to your best language because they don't know which one it is! Hahahahaha!! Unlike Zürich, where everybody just assumes that everybody else speaks English. Where, if you have an accent or make a grammatical error when speaking German, Swiss people give you this "isn't it cute that you're trying to speak German? But seriously, if you want to communicate, I'll just stick to English for you." And then the Swiss people complain that the foreign residents don't bother to learn German. But I digress...

Anyway, there was one major new development in my life since my previous trip to Lago Maggiore: I have really gone to town on learning German! I'm now at the point where I can carry on a rudimentary conversation with ease, and most slightly-more-complicated things I'd like to say, I can approximate in real time (or at least in a not-too-embarrassing length of time). But -- as anyone who has tried to learn a second foreign language can attest -- my new foreign language (German) is interfering with my earlier one (Italian)!!!

Fortunately, my German has not interfered with my French. I guess that since I lived in France for seven years (and I still speak French with lots of people on a daily basis), French has moved out of the "expendable foreign language" part of my brain...? Ever since learning French made me forget all my Latin, I've been very careful to practice and review French and Italian while learning German. (Aside: I don't understand those folks who can speak seven or eight languages fluently -- it's hard enough just learning four!) Anyway, if I haven't lost you already, you can probably see where this is going:

Every time I tried to speak to someone in Italian, a bunch of the words would come out in German. Totally unintentionally. I was trying to speak Italian and ended up speaking some sort of Italodeutsch. So, naturally, everybody assumed I was German. It's not that far-fetched an assumption -- the place was crawling with Germans-attempting-to-speak-Italian, and I'm not as fashionable as the French or Italians:


Leo liked the boat rides -- especially the video games

I thought it was pretty funny, actually.

So I was ordering some cappuccinos for breakfast the first morning, and the waitress (wanting to make sure I understood the difference between cappuccino and caffe latte, trying to pick an appropriate language for this explanation), asked "Deutsch?"

I immediately launched into this whole explanation about how, no, I'm not really German, haha, I'm just learning German, and I keep accidentally mixing up the words with Italian so people think I'm German, haha!

I suspect the problem was choosing to give this explanation in French. My husband's system was to say a few words to people in Italian, but then switch to French for anything he didn't know how to say in Italian. It normally worked like a charm -- everybody seemed to speak perfect French. Except maybe this one lady. She just gave me a kind of exasperated look and said "Zweimal cappuccino?" [German for "Two cappuccinos?"].

I thought about it for a second and replied, "Ja, zwiemal cappuccino. Isch guet."

After that, it hit me that sheesh, I speak Italian well enough that I can explain to people in Italian that I'm learning German, and I keep accidentally mixing up the words. So the second time I did it better. I was discussing different boat itinerary options with someone at the boat ticket counter, and as he turned to get me a page of information, he asked "Deutsch?"

That was my cue! I told him in [not-quite-right] Italian that I'm just learning German and sometimes I get the words mixed up. And when he smiled in comprehension, I thought success! actual communication!

After that, I made a point to prepare in advance before talking to people, planning Italian sentences and purging them of German words before speaking. Then I didn't have that problem anymore. But it was a fun little linguisto-cultural adventure!! :D

2011 State of the Me Address

You may recall from last year that I'd isolated three main categories of goals where I need to put in some effort: (1) career, (2) German, and (3) arts (writing/blogging).

So, how have I done?

1. Career -- on track. As usual, this is a point where it's not appropriate to post too many details to the Internet, but I'll just say I had some specific goals in mind about the direction I'd like to see my career heading, and where I'm at right now is (if anything) better than what I was hoping for.

2. German -- on track. I'm at the point where I can carry on more-or-less reasonable conversation with a very patient German-speaker. I'm about halfway through my intensive German class (two afternoons per week), and I'm enjoying it immensely. And I'm planning to spend my vacation this Summer on a really, really intensive German class/immersion in either Germany or Austria.

3. arts (writing/blogging) -- pretty much totally dropped the ball.

I had a number of different creative projects I wanted to work on this past year, and I got very close to zero work done on any of them. I haven't given up on them. Rather, as Jen Hancock (and Madonna) explained:

So NARAS asked her, how do you keep all those balls in the air? She said she didn’t. She just makes sure to remember where she drops them so that when she has the time she can pick them up again.

Even though lots of amusing stuff happened to me and my family -- which I could have written about -- I didn't even bother to keep my blog updated regularly! At least I updated my masthead so y'all would know I'm not dead...

The trouble is that I have more than twice as much stuff I'd like to do than I have time in a day to do it. I used to write a lot of blog posts in a little notebook while I was commuting on the bus or tram, and now that time has been taken over by German homework. (Well, let's be honest -- for a stretch of several months in there, I developed a rather unfortunate Sudoku habit that also ate up quite a lot of otherwise-potentially-productive commuting time.)

The one exception -- the project that I'm very proud of -- is how well things have been going at Main Street Plaza. For years I've been gathering all of the former-Mormon blogs into a common list (Outer Blogness) and encouraging community discussion by highlighting new blogs and interesting posts in my weekly column Sunday in Outer Blogness. But it was hard for MSP to really get a foothold as a central gathering place because we didn't have enough news and other content to keep people coming back. Then Chino Blanco signed on and changed that. And in the past year MSP has really taken off, from having a small-but-loyal readership to being one of the Internet's most popular blogs on the topic of Mormonism. And the success builds on itself: the more popular MSP becomes, the more people are willing to contribute interesting guest-posts!

Naturally, the blog that's doing well is the one that gets all of my Internet time lavished on it. Usually, I feel like I'm hardly doing anything substantial over at MSP, but it is amazing how time-consuming it is just to read everyone's blogs every week and look for ways to weave the different discussions together.

Another goal that wasn't on my official list -- but that I did a good job on -- was to spend more time with real-life (non-Internet) friends and with my kids. As far as the kids are concerned, I'm a huge believer in undirected, free, imaginative play. However, it's possible to go overboard on that. I like to set aside a certain amount of time to read to them, and to just sit down and play some of the things they're interested in with them. Especially now that they're getting to be old enough to build some really cool, complicated stuff out of Legos!

So, my goals for the comping year are (1) to keep going on the items that are on track (German, career, family, friends, MSP), (2) pick up some of the balls of creative projects I've dropped, and (3) Put some more effort into "thinking globally, acting locally" regarding the environment, charity, etc.

Bodensee vs. Lago Maggiore: Which boat ride is better?

Southern Germany, Switzerland, and Northern Italy are surprisingly similar. OK, actually, it's not surprising if you think about it for two seconds. But if I say "Picture Italy! Now picture Germany! Now picture Switzerland!" you come up with three totally different mental pictures, don't you? But if I say "Picture a big lake surrounded by mountains, with lots of pretty greenery and old cities and villages along the coast," well, that could be any and all of the above.

All of these lakes have public passenger boats to ferry you from one side to the other. Recall that last year we tested out the boats of Lago Maggiore. This year we decided to visit the Bodensee (a.k.a. Lake Constance) -- mostly because it's only an hour-and-a-half from Zürich by train, and the kids had never been to Germany before.

As you might expect, the boat rides are very similar but a little bit different. As a control, we also tested out the boat ride on the Zürichsee -- from Zürich to Rapperswil.

Since we didn't bring along my husband (who normally takes the photos), I have to settle for illustrating this post with photos taken by Nico. For example, it may not be obvious from the picture, but here we're on the boat on the Bodensee:


Leo, just a couple days before losing one of those teeth you see in this picture...

(Having an eight-year-old photo-document a trip definitely gives you a different perspective on what's interesting. For example, here's a photo he took of the doughnuts at the Zürich train station:


The exotic doughnuts of the American Bakery of Zürich)

In all three cases, we decided to have lunch on the boat. Here's how they stack up:

The Swiss boat had quite a nice restaurant. The German boat claimed to have a restaurant, but I'm not totally convinced that they had a real kitchen (as opposed to just heating up pre-prepared stuff, like on the train). And, in proper Goldilocks style, the Italian boat was between the two -- not super fancy, but economical, pleasant, and a good value.

Of course the restaurant quality probably had more to do with the size of the lake than with the surrounding culture. The Zürichsee is really small. You have to travel the lake the long way in order to have a two-hour boat ride. The only reason to take the boat is if you want to go on a pleasure cruise. If you just want to go to Rapperswil, you take the train -- it's more frequent, it's only a half-hour, and it costs the same as the boat. On the Bodensee, it took an hour-and-a-half to cross it the short way, so naturally the boat is full of people who are as interested in getting to the other side as they are in the joy of riding on a boat. Naturally, Lago Maggiore is between the two.

The big disadvantage of the Zürich boat was that they separated off the top level for first class. Already, it was a small boat with only two levels (unlike a proper lake boat, which should have at least three levels). That was a bit of a disappointment because part of the fun of a lake cruise is to wander around and explore the whole boat. And the second-class section was fancy enough that it kind of made me curious to get a first-class ticket sometime, just to see what's up there...

The big surprise, though, was that -- contrary to all popular stereotypes -- the Italian boat schedule was more logical (made more sense) than the German one. The various boat lines on Lago Maggiore were very well-integrated with one another, and they fit together in a clear, easy-to-understand timetable. Then (and this is such a simple thing that I can't imagine why they don't do it in Germany), they post the destinations of the next boat on the pier where the boat will land.

The thing is that each port has as many as six or seven numbered slots where boats can dock (for passengers to get on and off). I suspect that the mapping of which boat goes to which slot doesn't change much, but, still, they don't print it on the boat schedule, and (in Konstanz) they don't post it on the dock where the boat lands either. You have to go read the boat-to-pier mapping off a central monitor or chart (which you have to go find, and it can be rather far from the pier in question).

Now, you may be thinking that I just found the Italian timetables clearer because I still read Italian (a little) better than I read German. But seriously, it's just a table of numbers -- the language is irrelevant.

The language, however, is another fun aspect of the trip! All of these lake cruises are (obviously) quite touristic, but they're almost all designed for local tourists. The Bodensee, in particular, is geared almost entirely for German tourists. It's basically the warm-and-sunny Summer seaside holiday destination for Germans. So in Konstanz (unlike Zürich) -- even if my German is obviously really limited -- as long as actual communication is taking place, they won't spontaneously switch to English.

Similarly, around Lago Maggiore, the tourists are mostly from Switzerland, Germany, and France, so all of the tourist-relevant signage is in Italian, German, and French (but not necessarily in English). If you have trouble communicating in Italian, it's not totally obvious which other language they should switch to. So they just stick with Italian until the tourist switches to some other language.

Anyway, sorry this is a bit of a ramble -- but I hope it's useful to any of you who are planning to visit the lakes of the Alpine region! :D

Paris, it's good to be home!

A few weeks ago, I went to Paris to meet some friends. As I expected, as soon as I stepped into the streets of Paris -- and especially as soon as I got into the Metro -- I had an immediate sense of the familiar; like going home.

Now I've read a lot of people say that Paris is overrated, that the Métro smells, etc. The thing is that Paris can't help but get overrated -- it's one of the top tourist destinations in the world. Naturally, it must have a whole lot of people recommending it, yet, like all cities, Paris has its particular character and advantages, which won't appeal to everyone. And, voilà, you have a recipe for a lot of people wondering what all the hype is about. Then, once you visit a few more European cities, perhaps you'll find one whose flavor suits you better, and you can show your sophistication as a traveler by picking a less obvious city to recommend to your friends back home.

It's a little like the Eiffel Tower itself. I remember, as a kid, wondering why the Eiffel Tower is so famous. It's not impressively tall compared to modern buildings, and it's just a steel framework like some sort of antenna. I figured (correctly) that you must just have to be there. It turns out that it's actually kid of pretty for an antenna -- and it's cool that you can see it from all over Paris, and it's fun to go up and see it towering over a huge plaza and park.

Personally -- as a kid and young adult -- I was skeptical about all the francophile hype. I don't know much about art history (or European history in general), so a trip to Europe was never really high on my priority list until I started learning to speak French (as an adult, in grad school). Then, when I first got to Paris, I was pleasantly surprised by how convenient the public transportation was. I could wander on foot or by Métro in any direction and always stumble upon something interesting. I was also surprised to learn how different a city can look from the way all the cities look in the US. Plus, the culture just exotic enough to be charmingly fun without being truly disorienting.

My first trip to Paris was magical -- I wished I didn't have to leave. And, since then, I've been back there so many times, with family and friends. So what if the Métro smells? It's a familiar smell now, and all of the crazy corridors with their shiny white bricks and their ad-posters all in French are like home.

Naturally, it has become increasingly obvious that a big part of the magic of France for me has to do with the amount of effort I put into learning French. It affects how I feel about the place, about the people there, and about myself. So I've recently started listening to some German recordings that are a translation of a series I used when learning French so many years ago. No matter how silly the story or how cheesy the music, I like listening to it at night -- it relaxes me -- because (for me) it's the sounds of success.

During this past visit to Paris, I loved hanging out with my friends, and I always love visiting art museums with people who know a thing or two about art.



Yet, perversely, I didn't love how all of this English-speaking made me feel like an outsider, not really part of the city. (It's a little crazy, I know, but back at my hotel -- if anyone asked -- I was from Switzerland, and I was ready to make it convincing with a few phrases of German, if necessary.) Two of the friends I was visiting, though, speak good German, and they were very polite about letting me subject them to some of my terrible German. And, while wandering around, I was occasionally reminded of Zürich, and stuff I like there.

At the end, I got back on the train and settled into a good book. And as soon as the train pulled into Zürich Hauptbahnhof, I had an immediate sense of the familiar. There's the big clock whose design matches my watch, the familiar poster-ads in German, the kinetic light sculpture and the giant flying lady hanging from the ceiling of the great hall of the train station. Then I got on the tram and sat back and enjoyed the sights as it squeaked and squealed its way to my apartment. There, I hugged my husband and sons, and thought: It's good to be home!

Multi-lingual Puns!!!

Now -- as you know -- we're currently living in Switzerland, the land of many languages!

I pointed out to my kids the other day how funny it is that the German word for cold (kalt) sounds a lot like the Italian word for hot (caldo). So we invented a joke dialog in which a German and an Italian are debating about the weather on a hot day:

Italian: Fa caldo.
German: Nein! Es ist nicht kalt, es it heiss!

(and so on, ad infinitum, for lots of laughs...)

Well just today, my little Leo (who just turned 7), used this same formula to invent his own joke! He noticed that the German word for fast (schnell) sounds an awful lot like the English word snail (something not fast at all!):

English: Look, that is a snail.
German: Nein! Das ist nicht schnell! Das ist langsam!

(and so on, ad infinitum, for lots of laughs... ;^) )

I think German should be written in camelCase

I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this. ;^)

Everyone who's a programmer knows what camelCase is. That's when you use capitals in the names of variables or functions to make them more readable. For example: setLength() or startsWith().

You can probably see where I'm going with this in German.

Consider a simple number like 19,764. In German, it's neunzehntausendsiebenhundertvierundsechzig. Now, wouldn't it be more readable as neunZehnTausendSiebenHundertVierUndSechzig?

They already capitalize all of the nouns anyway, so why not go one step further? For example: "der Waschmaschinenschlauch" => "der WaschMaschinenSchlauch". Better, no?

It would also help with those crazy separable verbs. If you haven't studied German, you may not know that there's a whole class of verbs with prefixes that are sometimes attached, and sometimes find themselves on opposite ends of the sentence...

Take "zumachen" (for closing something like a window). You can say "Ich will das Fenster zumachen" or "Ich mache das Fenster zu." In my fantasy universe, it would be written "zuMachen".

Anyway, if any of you have access to the person who's in charge of German spelling/grammar rules, please be sure and suggest it. ;^)

Everything's coming up German!

My new goal is for my little family to learn the story and songs of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), and then go see a live performance of it.

Here's why this is the perfect plan: I already like some other Mozart operas (Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni), and have found that they're good for reinforcing my knowledge of Italian. Meanwhile, the kids enjoyed seeing Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Met, and Die Zauberflöte is even better for kids!

So now I'm going through the text of the various arias -- looking for which ones illustrate which points of German grammar -- so that I can coordinate this with my German lessons. Yep, that's the sort of thing I do for fun. :D

The funny thing is that I've gotten totally obsessed with German lessons lately. The first two years I was here in Zürich, I was constantly lamenting the fact that I don't speak German -- but I couldn't stand to open my German book and work on a lesson. I really wished I could scrape together the motivation to do it! Then I finally decided that I need to make it a priority, and guess what? Now that I'm making progress, I don't want to do anything else!

It's weird.

I hardly feel like blogging or reading the Internet (I'm still working on the follow-up to this post). I also have a list of friends that I'd really like to invite over to my place, but (as usual) it's a wreck, and -- bizarrely -- I don't even feel like going to IKEA and picking out more furniture to finish organizing the apartment! I just want to sit down with my German book and do another lesson.

Um... Be careful what you wish for....?

Blog Retrospective: Clash of Cultures!

Being an expat, I'm always interested in that mysterious space where cultures interact! How do we perceive each other? This question has been one of the main themes of my blog from the beginning. Here's a little taste of how my ideas on the subject have evolved over the past few years:


Have you ever wondered what the French think of peanut butter and Vegemite? Or what they think of "freedom fries"? Or what's my least favorite thing about France? (Hint: it's the merde). Well, wonder no more -- just follow the links!

Of course, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with this blog knows that my favorite thing about Europe is the transportation!!! I loved it when I was Living Downtown and Car-Free in Bordeaux, I've loved le metro ever since I first visited Paris, and I absolutely adore it here in Zurich: Transportation Paradise!! (Even if the Swiss rules of etiquette are a little mysterious...)

(Other great benefits, of course, are the education and health care.)

One of the most interesting things about moving to a new country is learning a new language! It's fun for the kids to test the linguistic boundaries. As for the grown-ups...? I contend that A foreign language is best learned in the bedroom . But that's not to say that good ol' English is uninteresting! Au contraire ! What with its million tenses and grammar rules that are made to be, like, broken. ;^)


And how's that culture shock? After a certain time abroad, my original country starts looking like a parallel universe, where the same laws of physics do not apply. After learning the richness of a new culture, it's frustrating to see your old compatriots reducing your new compatriots to cartoon characters! And don't forget the further-culture-shock adventure of moving from France to Switzerland -- It seems like it shouldn't be that big a deal, but it is! (Lucky thing I have my fellow weirdos to keep me company.)


And how do I fit into all of this? Well, you can start with my misadventures at a couple of big Catholic weddings. Or have a look at my time capsule: Baby's day in Bordeaux. Or have a look at some of my photos of the things you see in Bordeaux, of my life in Bordeaux, of the scale model of the solar system in Zurich, of Europride Zurich, and -- as a bonus -- of Lago Maggiore.

And do I miss my old traditions? Being a "cultural Mormon" in Europe? Stay tuned for next week's blog retrospective to find out!

A foreign language is best learned in the bedroom

Herr Doktor, seit einem Monat schlafe ich nicht. Eine schlaflose Nacht is für mich ein Qual. Welches Schlafmittel soll ich nehmen?

I always chuckle a little when this dialog comes up in my German lessons. For me, it's self-referential. The lady is asking her doctor what to take for insomnia. I say take some German lessons. Seriously.

Here's why learning a foreign language is the best cure for insomnia:

When you learn a foreign language as an adult, you have to learn the grammar rules. But, you don't become fluent by working out a little grammar algorithm in your head to compose each sentence before you speak. It has to become automatic. And that comes from (rather mindless) drills and memorization. You can train your brain by listening to your recorded dialogs so many times that you can recite them.

Insomnia, for me, is almost always a question of having some idea or problem stuck in my mind that I just can't stop obsessing about. Then, as the hours tick by, the thought that I'll be too tired to work the next day just compounds the problem with further stress and worry.

Language recordings to the rescue! As I focus on the dialogs in the recording, it pushes the other thoughts and obsessions out of my mind. Since I've heard these dialogs already (no surprises!) it's easy for my conscious mind to wander off to dreamland. And best of all, when it doesn't work, there's no compounding stress/worry about having wasted so many precious hours just lying there. No time was wasted at all -- I was improving my German, which I'm supposed to set aside time to do anyway!

I used this trick when learning French, and later Italian. I stopped doing it when my babies were born, though, because I didn't want any danger from the ear-bud cords where my babies and I were sleeping. Now that they're six and eight years old (and have been in their own big-boy beds for a number of years) I have no further excuses. Well, no good ones anyway.

I've only got a handful of lessons left in Allemand Pratique de Base, and if I finish them up by the end of the year, I'll have succeeded in one of my (very modest) goals. With interruptions, this beginner German course has taken me approximately two years. That's not so impressive when you consider that twelve years ago I completed the comparable course "Teach Yourself French" in the space of two weeks.

Of course things were a little different back when I decided to learn French. For one thing, it was Summer, and I had two weeks by myself. I had no kids to take care of. The only task on my agenda was procrastinating my PhD research, so I had 24 hours a day to devote to teaching myself to speak French. (Now, if you're thinking "Chanson, don't you have a Java book that you're procrastinating right now?" -- keep in mind that today, we have more advanced technology for procrastination: the Internet.)

Note that my motivation back then was a little different: there was a certain highly desirable Frenchman I wanted to impress. Motivation is the other reason the bedroom is the best place to learn a new language. Usually it's an annoyance for native speakers to help you practice while you blunder your way through their language. But the magic of romance turns it cute. Plus it makes you want to figure out how to say all sorts of different things to your foreign sweetheart. The trouble with this trick is that -- when successful -- it works only once. Now that I'm happily married to an adorable Frenchman, well, let's just say it limits the possibility of learning German in the same way.

And -- bringing this discussion full circle -- some of you may be noting that sex is also a good cure for insomnia. It is, but it's not as effective as listening to language lessons. Insomnia, language, and romance: three bedroom activities that go great together! ;^)

What languages are "easy to learn"? and why?

"Hmm, they've changed the menu," said my husband the other day, as we were preparing to order at one of our favorite local restaurants.

After a second, we discovered that, no, in fact they hadn't changed anything -- it was just that they'd given us the real menu (in German) for the first time, instead of the special English or French menu. The hostess was new, and we'd actually managed to get through the opening info (four for dinner; no, we don't have a reservation) without saying "What? Sorry, we don't speak German -- English or French, please." So we'd passed for people who speak German!

Then -- to live up to the expectation placed on us -- we ordered in German and spoke to the waitress only in German all evening! And I don't mean just pointing at items on the menu (though that helped). We used whole sentences. Relevant sentences, even.

After a year and a half living in a German-speaking country, finally being able to order in a restaurant is a pretty pathetic milestone. And note that this doesn't mean I can carry on a normal conversation in German, it just means that ordering in a restaurant is a pretty standard and structured type of dialog that is covered extensively in my "Teach Yourself German" recordings. (Actually, I wish I knew how to say "I'd like the same thing as that guy" -- it would really help out when ordering at cafeteria-style places...)

But I'm learning new words every day. As predicted, as soon as I learned of the existence of the word "Entschuldigung" I started hearing it everywhere. And the same thing keeps happening with other words. Every day I make a little more progress at deciphering the newspapers and billboards. It shouldn't be so hard, right?

Whenever it's time to make small-talk in a professional or business context, this topic (learning German) is golden!! Everybody has an opinion on High German vs. Swiss German or on the Swiss version of High German (which people think is the same as how people speak in Germany, but *haha* it isn't!). I always end up giving some variant of my usual story about how it's hard to get any exercise in German since everybody immediately switches to English as soon as they notice that I don't speak much German. I can count on one hand the few times people have insisted on continuing to speak to me in German after it became clear that I was stumbling over the simplest things. (Actually on one finger, now that I think about it.) And on that one occasion, I was surprised by how much I really did understand. But it's like with physical exercise -- it's easier to go out waking if you need to in order to get somewhere, but if you have to get out of your easy chair and force yourself onto the treadmill, too often you think "I'm tired, I'm busy, I'll do it tomorrow." Then there's the added complication that everybody's speaking in Swiss German but everything is written in High German, and they're not the same, and I don't understand either one of them.

"Well, German is a very hard language to learn," remarked one Swiss German guy at a business-social I was attending. Is it? I think he was just being nice, giving me an excuse for my pathetic level of progress. Learning German shouldn't be so hard for an English-speaker -- the two languages are related! The real problem is just that the call of reading blogs is so much stronger than my desire to listen to "Teach Yourself German" recordings. On the other hand, languages do vary in difficulty, and German has its drawbacks.

Here's my list of "what's wrong with German as a foreign language":

Too many verb forms (per verb) to memorize, and especially too many irregulars. And if that weren't bad enough, the nouns have different forms too, and they have three genders. For most words, the genders are distributed pretty randomly, and, notably, they don't align with the French genders of the same words. (What's with the neuter "das bier"? Everybody knows beer is feminine! "la bière," aah, perfect!) Continuing in the tradition of Mark Twain, I should now make fun of the word order in the sentence (all the verbs at the end...?), but at least the word order seems pretty consistent once you've learned a short list of amusing rules about it. Not like the forms of the word "the": If you say "der X", then X must be masculine... unless we're in the dative case, then saying "der X" means that X is feminine. Becuase the whole genders-and-cases thing wasn't challenging enough on it's own, they've decided to make your brain play Twister.

On the other hand, the common wisdom says that with English, it's easy to learn enough to get by, and then -- on top of that -- you can keep learning more and improving indefinitely. This may well be true. Unlike many languages, English words really don't have a lot of grammatical forms to memorize. Instead, English does a lot with helping words. A surprising thing I've found when comparing languages is that English has more verb tenses than the average language, but forms them in regular ways using helping words. As a fun little exercise, try and explain the different nuances expressed by the following:

1. I waited.


2. I've waited.


3. I'd waited.


4. I was waiting.


5. I used to wait.


6. I used to be waiting.


7. I've been waiting.


8. I'd been waiting.

Then tell me if there are any other standard past forms I've missed...

English has a few strikes against it for newbies, though. For one thing, the spelling is completely insane. I used to think that all languages have wildly irregular spelling, but, in fact, no. Try explaining a "spelling bee" to a Brazilian. In Brazil, it wouldn't make sense to try to compete over who can guess a word's spelling because in Portuguese, words are spelled exactly as they sound. French is also a big offender in the crazy spelling department ("beaux" = "bô"???), but I think even French is more regular in terms of limiting the number of ways a given phonetic syllable can possibly be spelled. And it's not just the common, little words in English that have bizarro spelling. When reading the word "apostrophe," could you guess the pronunciation if you didn't happen to speek English (or Greek)? In English, not only are archaic forms preserved in the amber of spelling rules, but multitudes of foreign words are welcomed in without being wholly assimilated.

So, how do your language experiences stack up?