I know I promised a review of jQuery and Dojo Core, but I still haven’t had a chance to review them. But rather than let another week go by without a word, I thought I’d write about something more personal:
I’ve been living in Germany about 9 months now (6th country I’ve lived in). In this time my knowledge of German has improved significantly. Learning my third language has been an interesting experience, and in many ways it was more different from my second (English) than I had expected.
For example, when I learned English, there was a long period of time where I could understand much more than I could speak. I thought that this was natural when learning any language and was surprised to find that this is not the case with German. With German I have always been able to say more than I can understand. The main reason is the huge variation in how German speakers talk. I’ll explain:
For us born in the Americas, we are used to a very homogeneous language. The differences between different Spanish-speaking regions (Mexico, Argentina) or between different English-speaking regions (Ontario, Texas) are nothing compared to the differences between different German speaking regions. Each region in Germany speaks its own “dialect”. German dialects vary smoothly so that a person can always talk easily with someone from neighbouring towns, but over a larger distance, the dialects become mutually unintelligible. A speaker from northern Germany could not communicate with one from southern Germany, were it not for the fact that they have both learned “High German” in school. To them, “High German” (the official language) is more or less a second language. If you “learn German”, High German is what you learn, but there are few regions in Germany that actually speak it natively.
For those of you familiar with Spain, think of the difference between Castellano and Catalán.
The situation with writing is better, but not much. Similar to Spanish but unlike English, in German people write more elaborately than they speak. Sentences are longer, words more complex and they even use different verb conjugations.
I have to say that it is a weird experience to have a one-way communication where I can talk to my girlfriend’s parents but I can’t figure out what they say. But all in all, learning German has been a fascinating and rewarding experience, and I look forward to being a true trilingual.
Edit: Did you know that in German “ehe” means before and “Ehe” (capital ‘e’) means “marriage”?
February 23, 2008
I was most interested in your comment about being able to understand more than you could speak in English, but the other way around in German. Long ago I studied French, German, and a little Spanish and Russian (not to the point of fluency in any of them), and my memory is that in each case I was able to speak more than I could understand (unless the other person spoke slowly and distinctly), and read more than I could speak. Mind you, my vocabulary was limited, my sentences were usually not very grammatical, and my pronunciation was often quite poor.