Stella is taking first-year German with Pete's former teacher, and she texted him for assistance. "Your task is to write a note to a teacher," said another teacher in a different class, and Stella picked Frau H.
"Help!" she wrote him. "What should I say to Frau H?"
Pete answered her right away with a couple of German sentences, and she copied and pasted his suggestion into her note. When I got home she told me about it. "I'm not quite sure what I said," she admitted.
I looked at her phone and burst out laughing.
Pete had told her to say, "I like to eat shoes! They are very tasty!"
Pete loves German; right now he's taking a college German class that he's really enjoying. When we're together we slide between English and German all the time, laughing frequently at our clunky German sentences. Last week he asked me if I had time to talk on the phone and for a moment my innards seized up. He's a Gen Z kind of guy, and I have hardly ever spoken to him on the phone even though we text regularly. Was something wrong??
Nothing was wrong -- he wanted to tell me a funny story from one of his classes. But he wanted to tell me in German, and I couldn't keep up. The connection was bad, and it felt harder to untangle what he was saying with no visual input, and after a few minutes I said, "Sorry, sweetheart, can we switch to English?"
Anyway: the point is that he likes thinking about constructing sentences in German and he was well equipped to give his sister some useful input. But instead he told her to say she likes to eat delicious shoes.
"What in the world?" I asked him.
It goes back to Joe, who told Pete before his first-ever German class that he should greet the teacher with "ich mag Schuhe essen!" Pete is a dutiful guy, and he introduced himself to Frau H. with "ich mag Schuhe essen!" He's not sure she'll remember it, though; she might just think Stella, like Miracle Max, is partial to a tasty MLT. In this case, though, it's a Mary Jane, lettuce, and tomato.
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