One Kraut Two Kraut Three Kraut Four

The first thing that I seem to have forgotten whilst living here in Germany (other than the fact that “whilst” sounds as affected as hell) is spelling. Without my trusty spell check on this computer, I am relatively confident that I would sound like a second-grader even in my own language. It is a strange balance that an expatriate has to accept—to not be truly proficient in either of the languages that are closest to you. Sucks to be dumb. Now I know what it feels like, all of you morons I constantly teased to no end in high school and beyond. I am sorry about that. (As though they have the brains to read this blog...) Oops. Sorry. I did it again. Culpa.

This all occurred to me, the spelling, that is, when I was doing a crossword and could not, for the life of me, remember if ‘Inca’ was spelled with a ‘k’ or a ‘c’. That whole ‘k’ ‘c’ thing is the first to go for a German/English bilingual, I’ll bet. The second is the rather obsessive use of hyper-logical prepositions. Germans will always tell you, as I am relatively sure anyone speaking any language in the world would also say, that theirs is the most complex language and that it has many more words than the English language. (How a language is more complex because it has more words is beyond me almost as much as is the concept that someone, without a degree in linguistics or, for that matter, someone who has never seen the multi-volumed Oxford English Dictionary, can assume that one language has more words than another.) Twelve points to anyone who understood that last sentence. The author is hereby docked 13 points for overly complex sentence structure, a possible example of run-on, and, since the judges didn’t get it either, the additional possibility that the sentence simply made no sense. Damn you, judges,

Anyway, the preposition thing has nearly driven me mad up till now. I use, folks, as my example today the word ‘ziehen’. ‘Ziehen’ means ‘to pull’. You see it everywhere printed on doors, as might be expected. I always feel like that Gary Larson cartoon where the kid is pushing on a door that says ‘pull’, trying to get into the “Academy for the Gifted” or some such thing, when I go to the Rathaus here. They have glass doors, and near the handle is either ‘drücken’ or ‘ziehen’ depending. The problem is, you can see the word, reversed of course, printed on the other side of the door. For some reason, the greatly confuses me, because my mind always reads the inversed message, taking it as the primary one, and misinstructs my hands sending me, flailing, in a rush right into the door I should have pulled. Big dummy. It doesn’t help that this usually happens right in front of the Foreign Citizens Bureau, making me look even more like an big, Aerican dum-dum. Grrrr.

Back to ‘ziehen’. ‘Ziehen’ is used for everything. If you change residences, you must “pull about” in German (umziehen), when you get dressed, you have to “pull upon” (anziehen), children here are “pulled big” (großziehen) making me think of some giant, state run taffee pull for children, to make a nice egg dish you may need to “pull your eggs under” (Unterziehen), you “pull up” stickers you don’t remove them (abziehen), and you “pull up” in an elevator even if you are being pushed (aufziehen.)

My mind can’t help but make literal translations of the phrases that I sometimes hear, (There have been many times when I didn’t know the word for something and just made it up from one of the core German words plus preposition and it was actually right. That is always a fun, light bulb moment.) The flip side, of course, is that being here puts the whole grammatical structure of my mother tongue in question. I am sure that in another couple of years this blog is going to read like a Vietnamese transient extracted from a sweat shop somewhere in Jersey...“Me no likey Germanland because the Germans no sense of humor have...Me talk pretty some day.”