A month or two ago, I was skimming what was available on BookMooch that was 1) in German and 2) available from users in the States. I saw a fiction book, Wie ein einziger Tag by some fellow named Nicholas Sparks. I was wanting a run-of-the-mill fiction book so as to work on my everyday German vocabulary, and this looked like it might fit the bill. I hopped over to the amazon.de page, saw that it had an excellent overall rating, and requested it. I received it in short order, and put it on the shelf until I had some time to sit down and work through some of it.

Tonight I had a bit of time, and so I pulled the book out with pen and notebook in hand. I read through the first 15 or 20 pages, and well – oh my. It’s what I get, really, for being out of the loop in regards to bestseller novelists, especially those who write mostly romance. Sentimental, gushy romance. I skimmed through some of the later sections of the book, and came to the conclusion that, while I’m willing to submit myself to a lot of things in my quest for an enlarged German vocabulary, Nicholas Sparks is not one of the things I’m going to submit myself to. Yuck. I felt like I was reading a very bad soap opera.
If I’d seen this cover of The Notebook (the original English version of Wie ein einziger Tag), I would have known to stay far, far away:

See, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.

If anyone wants a copy of Wie ein einziger Tag, there’s a copy available on BookMooch.

The movie takes place in the early 80s in East Germany, beginning, indeed, in 1984. Whether that was a coincidence in plotting or a nod to Orwell, I don’t know. The plot focuses on the Stasi, and specifically on one agent, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, spying on a playwright and his girlfriend. Why is the Captain spying on them? Because one of the top dogs in the Stasi hierarchy wants his girlfriend, and so wants the playwright out of the way. As Georg, the playwright remarks at one point, “To think that people [like that] ruled a country.”

I won’t give away how the plot progresses or how the movie ends, because I’m hoping that you’ll rent it and watch it. I know that many people dislike watching a movie with subtitles, which is what you’ll have to do if you don’t speak German, but it really is worth the trouble. Ulrich Mühe did a truly amazing job in portraying the almost soulless agent, the “little gray man” as Ebert called him. While the other actors and actresses were all good, Mühe made the film; without him, it probably wouldn’t have worked.

Not only was the movie excellent entertainment-wise, with some of the most tense moments I’ve experienced while watching a film, it also opened my eyes to German history beyond the Nuremberg Trials. In my interest obsession with World War 2, my advancing through German history stalled and eventually stopped. I knew that Berlin had been split between the Western Allies and the Russians, and that East Germany was communist, but that was about where my post-WW2 German history knowledge stopped. The movie has led me to start looking into later events, particularly in regards to East Germany, and I must say: it’s not pretty. I’ve not read a huge amount on the Stasi, by any reckoning, but what I have read is pretty awful. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, once remarked that, “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.”

Poking into the history of the Stasi, however, will be saved for a later post; for now, take my advice. Go out, rent Das Leben der Anderen, and watch it. If you’re disappointed with it, you can come back here and yell (or type in all caps) at me. I won’t mind. (Not that it’ll happen, mind you – you’ll enjoy the movie.)

Something made me smile a few days ago. I mentioned to my mom that I’m interested in perhaps learning some Russian. She responded, “But you haven’t finished with German yet!”

No, I’m not, nor will I ever be!

I think a lot of people who have never really studied a foreign language in earnest have this misconception that you study the language for a certain amount of time, and then you’re “done”. You’ve learned the language, you know all of the words, and it’s time to move on. Nicely done, here’s your certificate that says you “know” such and such language. Unfortunately, this is far, far from the truth. Learning a foreign language is a lifelong process. There will always be new words you don’t know, new idioms that come up in the language – in other words, there will always be more to learn. Even if you decide to stop actively learning the language – stop studying new grammar points, stop learning new words – you have to use the language to maintain what you have learned. Learning a foreign language consists of both learning new material, and keeping up on what you’ve already learned. I know from experience that taking a break, even a short one, can be extremely detrimental to your language proficiency. Longer breaks can often throw you back to the very beginning. You’ll relearn the material faster than you learned it the first time, but often, you will have to relearn it. You have to keep using a foreign language for you brain to keep hold of it. It’s like a muscle that isn’t used: eventually it weakens, and then atrophies.

I’ve often had people make remarks about being “done” with a foreign language. I quite often lug a German dictionary around with me, or perhaps some flashcards. People who know about me learning German, but haven’t seen me in a while, will often say something like, “Oh, I figured you’d be done learning German by now! How much longer do you think it will take?” Hah – a long time. A very, very long time!

Image under CC by DanielJames.

In learning German, I think I’ve come to learn how to learn languages – or at least started to learn how. One of the major points I stupidly ignored when I started (and actually for quite a while, up until just recently, actually) was listening. The first foreign language I dabbled in was Latin. It being a dead language, I simply studied it through my Wheelock’s text; I didn’t listen to any CDs of it, or news broadcasted in Latin (but I could have if I’d wanted to). There was a need to be able to sound out the words in my mind as I read along, but I didn’t have to have any real listening ability. When reading texts, I could take my slow, sweet time in translating them. I learned vocabulary by rote memory, along with grammar rules, and then did exercises.

I think that my initial learning strategies for Latin bled off onto learning German when I started learning it a few years ago. I think I came to assume that if I could read and write German, I could automatically listen and speak well, too. How wrong I was! They’re all very different skills. Being able to do one excellently does help the others, sure, but it doesn’t make you good at them. You have to practice them all independently. One of the big eye-openers about this for me was when I started working with a language partner through eTandem. When I first started working with Marcel, my partner, we just did emails. After a while we started chatting some over MSN Messenger. And after a bit longer, we tried some voice communication via Skype. While I generally always had questions about his emails in German, I could figure out what he was trying to convey (usually). The same went for our chats; while I wouldn’t know every word, I could generally get some idea of what he was talking about. And then we tried voice communication, and I suddenly felt like I didn’t know any German at all. He’d fire off a sentence and I’d be left going, “Uhhh.. say what?” When he’d type it out and I could read it, it would sink in: oh, that’s what he was saying!

This was a good indication to me that my ears simply weren’t trained in deciphering German spoken at a normal pace. In spoken conversation, you don’t have time to look at a word repeatedly like you do in a written text, wondering what it means. You don’t have time to study the verb conjugations or the word order. You simply have to be able to listen and understand. If you pause even briefly to try and think something through, the speaker has already said a dozen more words, and you’ve missed a sentence or two. You can quickly fall so far behind in the conversation that you might as well not bother! Since having this realization smack me in the face, I’ve been really been trying to listen more. I figure I’ve neglected listening so long, it might do me some good to really focus in on it for a while. I’ve started a small collection of German podcasts, and I try to listen to a few of them everyday. They’re only 10 to 20 minutes each, but even in such short podcasts, there are huge amounts of words that I still don’t know, so it’s plenty for now. While I’m still far from fluent, after a few weeks of regularly listening to German podcasts, my ears have gotten better at picking out words. Even if I don’t know what the words mean, I can at least tell, audibly, where one word ends and another begins. I’m happy with my progress so far.