Goodbye, Goethe!

At the last gathering I had with my German friends last summer, I made a bold announcement. I said that at the next naturist gathering which will be in summer next year, I would be speaking High German with a liberal sprinkling of Goethe quotations.

When I got home, I tried my hand at my first German lesson. I thought that with some determination and industry, I should be able to memorise a list of German words and construct sentences with them. But what I was not prepared for  and didn't know then is the ubiquitous elision in every German phrase.  For example, I can memorise every word in this sentence:

Und wie geht es Ihnen?

But when the sentence is spoken, it doesn't sound at all like its written form. It sounds more like 'Unt-veegeete-seen'. Everything is elided into something totally different. How can I possibly learn such a language? There's no way I can speak it even if I can memorise all the words.

It's not as if I am a complete linguistic idiot. Although I am certainly no language expert, I'd like to think that I'm reasonably competent in coming to grips with at least a few languages which are very much linguistically diversified. The differences between English and my native Oriental language are huge, to say the least. You can't find two other languages that are more dissimilar than these two. I can also speak like a native an Indo-Polynesian language which is unique in its own way. I didn't think that German which is of the same Germanic family as English would be that difficult but it proves to be insurmountably difficult. According to the US Department of State, the German language is placed in Category 2 in terms of difficulty while French is ranked only 1 in difficulty. So, German is twice as difficult as French and everyone knows how impossible it is to speak French.  But the same website also lists Chinese under Category 4 or one of the 'super-hard languages'.

I remember reading a long time ago that our brains are incapable of acquiring a new language in adulthood. The three languages that I can speak today are languages that I acquired in my early childhood. I know a few people in my country who because of cultural chauvinism taught their children only the Chinese tongue. Their children learnt English only when they went to school and it's easy to see lapses in the language of these children.

For example, one of the peculiarities of the English language is the obligatory nature of the determination of noun phrases which is a feature that is totally absent in Eastern languages. It is so important in English that even in instances that do not admit of the determinative element, linguists speak of it as if it's still there. I have noticed that people who can only speak English after they have gone to school have a tendency even in later life of mentally reverting to their native language by analogy and they seem unable to internalize this simple feature of English grammar.

When I was a boy, I was made to do exercises in Latin. I remember sitting at my desk many a dreadful afternoon fruitlessly declining and conjugating words.  And to what end? I can't speak a word of Latin even if it's to save my life. I can't even shout 'Help me!' in Latin if I fall off a cliff and am hanging on to a frail branch for dear life.

I am positive that any attempt to learn German is going to be a repeat of my childhood drill of 'insula', 'insulae', 'insulam', 'insularum' etc and I'm sure I have mixed up the singular declension with the plural in the list.  It's sad but this is a limitation of the human brain and there is nothing I can do about it. Whatever language that was not acquired in early childhood is lost for ever. And I really thought I would be reading Goethe in the original next summer.

German is a beautiful language and if I can't learn how to speak it, I can at least take a selfie with it.