Broken German

Perhaps the first thing any tourist must overcome is the fear of being seen as an utter fool. (I use the word "tourist" in the sense of a person who wishes to visit a foreign culture — not just hang around with other insufferable Americans at a resort; if there were a lower genus than "tourist" I should assign such cultural troglodytes to it.) Irredisregardless of how well one knows the language and mores, one will make mistakes. Foolish mistakes. In a larger city, like Vienna, they are at least accustomed to having ignorant tourists frolicking about, but in the hinterland the things we do can come across as genuinely peculiar.

The chief barrier to communication is, of course, the language. While I have taken a German course in college and spent ten weeks previously in Vienna, my German is still, one might say understatedly, inelegant. My vocabulary is limited, yes, but far more limited is my knowledge of German grammar and syntax. The greatest problem posed by the German language to the amateur speaker is not (only) the word order but mostly the articles. German, as you may know, has three genders, with corresponding articles. It also has declensions, and while some nouns are declined, it is mostly the articles that bear the brunt of this process. It is thus difficult to even represent the sort of mistakes the English speaker is likely to make in his forays into German. There are two options for the ignoramus who would nonetheless have himself understood: (1) omit articles entirely. I suspect this comes across a bit like cave-man language. Or (2) attempt articles with the knowledge that most of them are incorrect. This was my strategy, and, though my sins against the German language were many, it seemed I got my point across. A good many conversations have been conducted in both broken German (on my part) and broken English, for while English is spoken by some Germans, they learn it a bit like Americans learn Spanish: for a few years in school, perhaps, then to be mostly forgotten. It is work, maintaining a language.