Picking-Up A Foreign Language by Chloë McGrane

Writing inspired by the following SWC prompts:

Write about your first experience learning or picking up a foreign language.

Picking-Up A Foreign Language

by Chloë McGrane

I grew up with four languages in my household: English, Irish, German and Sarcasm. If you are familiar with the language family tree, Sarcasm is an unrecognized branch of the Anglo-Frisian variety. Some may even argue that it is a dialect more than a language. However, I have found it to be specific to the English-speaking contingents.

To understand how these languages intertwined with each other in my day-to-day life, let’s use the Irish Sea as an analogy. English would be the water, Sarcasm the salt in the water, Irish the occasional current rippling through, and German the clunky seagull swooping down, squawking sporadically and spitting out random noises.

Perhaps sporadic squawking is the most accurate way to describe my exposure to the German language growing up. My dad never spoke full sentences to us, but he would inject certain words and phrases into situations, usually shouting them in an overly dramatic German accent, JAWOHL! and UM DIE ECKE being two of his favourites. That’s why, when I was twelve years old and picking my subjects for high school, I felt confident that I would excel in German because, sure, wasn’t I already basically fluent?

I sniggered in delight as my classmates answered with ‘Ja’, while I used ‘Jawohl’, which I thought just meant ‘yes, indeed’, until I was informed that saying ‘yes, sir!’ to my fifty-something year-old female German teacher in a classroom full of girls was actually kind of offensive. As for ‘um die Ecke’, this didn’t make an appearance until my second year learning German, when we covered more advanced grammar. And suddenly ‘um die Ecke’ wasn’t just ‘um die Ecke’ anymore, but it was a sentence that contained an accusative preposition and involved a changing state. Now, whenever I hear ‘um die Ecke’, I can visually see my dad marching around a corner.

Maybe it was my dad’s influence or maybe I just had a knack for picking up languages but either way, I sailed through German and really enjoyed it, so much so that I thought it would pair perfectly with my economics degree and decided to continue studying it at university. Irregular verbs and the imperfect tense were like chewing gum for my brain in between the line graphs and macro/micro economics formulae. So, when I was offered a job in Linz after graduating, I jumped at the opportunity to put my German language skills to use.

The summer before I moved, I would spend hours poring over Google Maps, familiarising myself with the route to work, my neighbourhood, virtually wandering through the Hauptplatz and strolling along the Danube. When I arrived in Linz, everything was just how I had imagined, if not even more gorgeous in the flesh; the creamy buildings at the main square that illuminated in the sunshine and blushed a shade of peach as the sun set in the evenings, and the Danube, which was even grander than I had imagined, offering its very own visual performance each evening with the colour-changing lights of the Ars Electronica and Lentos museum reflecting on the water.

Everything was just how I had imagined, except for the language.

On my first day at my new job, my colleagues asked if I would prefer to communicate in German or English and naturally, I said German. I was then brought around by my supervisor and introduced to everyone, the first being a 6”5 man with more hair on his upper lip than on his head and wearing a pair of embellished Lederhosen (you couldn’t write it). He put out his arm with the same abrupt motion as if he were chopping a tree and gave me a firm handshake.
‘Ggjreaztgawdtt.’
I blinked.
‘Irchichrptoehccwpiv3t.’
I blinked again and smiled, wondering if his mustache was just muffling the sounds coming from his mouth.

Another colleague stepped in front of me, this time a frail-looking lady with wispy brown hair. I shook her hand gently, almost afraid if I squeezed too hard I might crush her bones.
‘G04c93uji4shgbg.’
A bead of sweat slowly started rolling down my temple. What language are these people speaking?! It sounded like the language they spoke in The Sims. It was familiar but foreign at the same time. By the time I had met the rest of my colleagues, my armpits were damp and any moisture had evaporated from my mouth, along with my dignity.

At lunchtime, I sat and listened to my colleagues converse with each other and could not pick out a single word that I recognised. My entire self-worth was now staked on my ability to communicate in this foreign language and to avoid my self-esteem plummeting even further, I decided that non-verbal responses were the only way I was going to survive this. I got by that day using minimal German and mostly smiling and nodding any time someone interacted with me and eventually, my colleagues resorted to speaking English. I felt like a fraud. The audacity of me to prance around and claim that I spoke fluent German! I went home that evening feeling so depleted and frustrated. I had spent the guts of ten years studying German, I always got top marks in my exams, and I thought that I was well and truly over the hump of “picking up” the language. My stint in Linz, however, taught me that you don’t pick up a foreign language. The foreign language picks you up. Picks you up from the sea you are so used to, with its saltiness, gentle currents and squawking seagulls and drops you right into the Danube, naked, immersing you in a vast, seemingly-never-ending river, where any German currents have long been filtered out and what remains is a torrent of Upper-Austrian waves howling ‘Oachkatzlschwoaf’ as you try to stay afloat.