Blythe Spirit

The Sequel

Yesterday, I learned about the Konjunktiv II tense in my German class. I don’t remember much of what was introduced, because learning a language is all about repetition. And since yesterday was my last day in the class, I guess I’ll have to live without knowing about it. For a while longer, at least.

Five days per week, four hours per day, is a half-time job. Fortunately, the only job I ever had where I had to sit in one room for four hours at a time lasted for just one summer, and the best part about it was that it was at a suction cup factory, because now I can tell people that my summer job in college was at a suction cup factory. The worst part about it was that my boss, the owner’s wife, went around diagnosing people with various disorders whenever she got bored. But that’s a story for another blog.

I attended my German class for nine weeks. That’s over 150 hours of instruction, if you take out the coffee breaks and the couple of days I skipped school for good reasons like moving into our apartment and visiting the Alps. I can now understand about one-fifth of what goes on around me, versus 1/25th when I got here. I still can’t decode the newspaper, but I am able to decipher posters and understand the gyst of the announcements that come over the loudspeakers in the train station.

My teacher was a calm sea of patience, she smiled and laughed at me even yesterday when I displayed my perpetual inability to correctly use an umlaut. (I blame this on Motley Crue’s early influence.) My classmates included a young woman from Colombia, who is living away from home for the first time and who helped improve my Spanish; an 18-year-old Palestinian from Israel who asked me if I could find him a wife and who shared his cough drops with me, and a crazy Scot who had just moved to Germany from Spain, and who taught the class a whole different English vocabulary than they’d learned from me. I made a good friend who makes Turkey an even more interesting vacation destination for me than it was before. And I learned some adjectives and articles and verb conjugations as well.

When I return to Germany in January, I hope to sign up for a less-intensive set of language lessons. Maybe I’ll eventually learn about Konjunktiv II. (but apparently Konjunktiv I is not as useful; a little like those Transporter films that I never noticed until the sequel appeared in theatres?)