Before taking German for the first time last semester, the only German I knew for a fact was, "auf Wiedersehen," and that was thanks to Heidi Klum and the TV Show Project Runway. Other than that, the stereotypical German I heard was very harsh, and had the connotation of being scary. As Americans, we do not get to hear much German. In films like Inglorious Basterds, or The Grand Budapest Hotel we hear snippets. In music from the band Rammstein, they purposefully over articulate the words to further promote the harshness of the language. Besides these pop culture examples, the only German encountered in school is clips of Hitler speaking, and the scare tactics used in just the harshness of his tone and accent do not make the German language seem as beautiful as it really is.
After a few weeks of living in Germany, I was able to meet up with one of my friends from boarding school, Ambra. Ambra is from Munich, but currently lives and works in Berlin at Babelsberg Studios. At boarding school, I showed close to no interest in learning German, but I always liked listening to her and the other German students speak. Now that I am learning the language, Ambra was curious about if I liked it. My first response was, "It's so cute !!!!" and she said, "Right?!" and explained how Americans have a very warped image and sound of what German is and sounds like. She also pointed out that many Americans learning German as a second language often pronounce words and sounds incorrectly and it never corrected. As an example, take the word "ich." The word should be pronounced with a a soft version of "isch," (not perfect, but come out to my Blocker Fellowship Presentation and I will show you!) but is instead often pronounced as "ick." Ambra was very passionate about how annoyed she gets when people pronounce "ich" as "ick," and I agreed. After taking one semester of German at HWS and the 4 week course in Leipzig, that is the one word I know that I pronounce correctly. When I arrived in Berlin for the semester, at least 4 people in my 10 person class said "ick." I was very shocked, especially considering I had the least amount of German courses before this class out of anyone. For some reason, everyday I heard "ick" in German class and my teacher never corrected them.
At HWS, I study education, so I have been contemplating the phenomena of not correcting pronunciation a lot. I do not want to teach languages, I want to teach English literature. But, if my class was reading Shakespeare and a student continually pronounced a word used in every other sentence incorrectly, I would want to correct them. This way other students would not pick up on the same bad habit and the student would learn something to use in classes in the future. The same goes with vocabulary in general- if students pronounce something incorrectly, as a teacher, I need to teach them the correct way. Thinking about my German class in the context of living in a German city, I think that my teacher chose to not correct these students because it might embarrass them and make them even more nervous to speak the language. In this case, I understand that one of the most important parts of studying abroad in Germany is to learn and use German, so because saying "ick" will not prohibit native German speakers from understanding, these students will say "ick" for probably the rest of their time speaking German.
While this is good because it is encouraging speaking German, it is unfortunately furthering the idea that German is a harsh and ugly language. In my German class at HWS, I quickly learned that German is a very cute language. My first encounter realizing that I was soon going to love this language is the word "die Handschuhe." I love this word because in English it means gloves, but in a direct translation, this word means "shoes for hands," and I think that that is the best way to describe gloves. Another example of thinking German is cute is when in class we had to draw a monster and label the parts of its body. My group drew the head as a heart. We asked out professor what to say for this, and he said that in German you can make up your own words with preexistsing words. This means that a head shaped as a heart would be "Herzkopf," or "Hearthead." I can think of many other times that I fell in love with the German language, but these two are the first instances and some of my favorites.
The poem below is a list of my favorite German words. Some of them are my favorite because I think they are cute, and others are words I run into more than I thought and they have become some of my favorite. Thank you for reading!
