Pete is in AP German this year, taking the AP exam in May. (Not the point of this post, but: can you even believe that my first blog baby is turning 17 this spring?) He really, really wants a 5. In the past year or so he has discovered a fiery enthusiasm about the workings of language: he reads linguistics texts for fun and has decided that he wants to study computational linguistics in college instead of majoring in plants.
His determination to get better at German has highlighted for him -- and for me -- the gulf between genuine proficiency in a language and competent performance in a high school class. He has recruited me as his companion in the quest for genuine proficiency. When I am biking to nowhere in the basement, he sits with me and we practice German vocabulary. In the evenings sometimes we listen to the Slow German podcast on Spotify. And now he has decided that the two of us should only speak German to each other.
Have I told you my story of learning German? It was a Life Lesson in the limitations of proficiency testing. In the fall quarter of my freshman year I took elementary German and loved it. My instructor was an Irish grad student, and I am still unlearning the Irish accent with which I unknowingly adorned my beginner German. The only thing, though, was that I thought the class should move faster. I decided I would take a Latin literature class instead during the winter quarter, learn second-quarter German on my own, and jump back in for the spring quarter.
As spring quarter approached I began to have second thoughts, and I spent a fair amount of spring break cramming reflexive verbs into my brain. But it worked out swimmingly, and I decided to do the same thing again: take French in the fall quarter of my sophomore year, and jump back into winter-quarter German.
At the beginning of the winter quarter I got cold feet. It had been more than six months since I had been in a German classroom. Was I going to land myself in hot water? What if I didn't remember enough of the German I had taught myself in seat-of-the-pants fashion? I decided to take the proficiency test, and placed into a third-year class. This seemed bonkers to me, but the placement coordinator was not eager for me to take a second-year class once I had passed his test. "Off you go!" he said. "This test is a bear! You'll be fine."
This is how, with only two-thirds of the first-year German curriculum under my belt, I wound up in a third-year German lit class for which I was woefully underprepared. HOO BOY, I still remember the inner shiver I felt when the imposing professor would look at me over the tops of his spectacles. "Und was denken Sie, Fräulein Most?" he would rumble, and I would tremble. I squeaked by, with many tears and much gnashing of teeth, and never took another German class. (I was also left with some enduring skepticism about the merits of proficiency testing.)
It turns out that a long-ago class on post-war German fiction doesn't really equip a person to hold a conversation in German, so I have been filling in some of the gaps slowly, leaning on Duolingo, children's books, and chats with Pete. I have learned most of what Duolingo has to teach me, but there's still such a long way to go.
Pete's idea that we should only speak to each other in German is a real stretch for me: I just don't have the vocabulary. But I am trying, with a lot of circumlocution and sound effects. This morning I was trying to tell him about a complicated local situation that arose in the wake of a snowstorm, and I needed to know how to say "tow truck." (Turns out it's Abschleppwagen: away-haul-wagon.) I also don't have good code-switching abilities. If I were fluent, I could slide back and forth between German and English without thinking too much about it. Instead of sliding, I am clunking. "SPEAK GERMAN," I tell my brain, and it does its best to comply. But then Elwood asks me a question and I have to pause. "NOT TO ELWOOD," I tell my brain, which has obligingly served up a response to his question in a language he does not speak.
I have been preaching the glories of language to my children for as long as I have had children, and they have mostly nodded along without sharing my enthusiasm. But Pete, suddenly, turned around and said "YES, GLORIOUS, SO GLORIOUS!" It's so much fun.
(He thought I should write this blog post in German, but I exercised my veto power on that one.)
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