The language pyramid

German class for this semester is almost over. That makes me reflect on my progress with learning the German language. It's harder to measure than just by counting the workbook exercises I've completed. Here are some examples.

Last Friday I ran into 3 of my neighbors who were chatting in the stairwell. Norbert and Jörg, our gay neighbors, were chatting with Matti from the 3rd floor. I managed a little small talk with them. My level of German language competence now is at "fluent in small talk". I can hold my own on topics such as weather, where I come from, whether I am married or have kids, how long I have lived in Germany, etc. I can even ask a few things back, like how long have you lived here or can I get a mushroom pizza to go.

I did break into the next level once, when I got really annoyed with the dry cleaner. Cleaners in Hannover take forever and cost a ton. Therefore, I have become closer acquainted with spray starch and better friends with my iron. This incident involved a pair of Brian's dress pants that wasn't done on time. The pants weren't ready when they were supposed to be. So I had to come back again a few days later. Then the dry cleaning lady couldn't find them. When I finally found the pants on the rack for her, the stain was still there. And despite all that she charged me something like 8 euros. The ensuing conversation went something like this :
Dry cleaning lady: That's 8 euros
Me (in German) : Ok, but I am not coming back here again.
Dry cleaning lady: but.. sometimes this happens... you know it's not our fault when it takes so long... we send these out somewhere else...
Me: Yes, but it doesn't matter to me where they are. I still have to wait. More than a week is too long.
Dry cleaning lady: Yes, but, but...
Me: Thank you, goodbye.

Score one for me, at least linguistically. Or score one less for German customer service. I guess my expectations are too high. In the U.S., the same dry cleaner would have probably given me the pants back for free, or at least given me a coupon for my next visit.  She probably could have located the pants without my help. And she would have apologized profusely and brought in the owner of the shop to apologize too. In English you say "the customer is always right". In German you say "the customer is king" (der Kunde ist König). The dry cleaning lady doesn't have that phrase in her vocabulary, apparently. I'd settle for her saying "yes, here are your pants."

Therefore, I have made this scale of my German conversational competency:

I am working on the level: understanding 50% at the bike shop

Other steps that I hope to achieve in the future will be: understanding radio DJs, reading newspaper articles, and composing emails in German without 18 trips to Google Translate. The ultimate success would be holding my own at a party. When several people are talking at once I slide down toward the bottom of the pyramid and start talking like a baby again. Learning a language is very humbling.

So back to the neighbors and the stairwell: Matti mentioned that he was hosting Kaffee and Kuchen the next day as some sort of a belated birthday celebration, and we were all invited. I made some kind of noncommittal reply and left him to talk about bigger things with Norbert and Jörg while I groaned on the inside. Kaffee and Kuchen is like my least favorite type of German social gathering. You come over to someone's house in the middle of the day with no music playing and sit inside and drink coffee (which I don't like) and eat cake (which I do). It's like sitting around with an elderly relative and listening to the clock tick (no offense to my elderly relatives, who are actually a lot of fun). Plus if it's a birthday thing then you have to bring a gift and I didn't know if it would be a lot of new people there and sometimes I am oddly shy and etc etc (fill in as many excuses as you like). Bottom line - I didn't go. But then I felt bad about it. After all, Matti and his girlfriend Saskia have really looked out for us in terms of translating documents from the landlady about how she wanted to cheat us, and accidentally inviting us to neighbor parties in which we weren't supposed to included. "You know," Brian told me, "if you feel guilty about it you could just invite them up here."

Story to be continued...