Summary: German sounds difficult for English speakers, perfecting my accent, and getting complimented or insulted for it.
I knew I’d never pass as a German during my year abroad. My thick, black (at the time) hair, my facial structure, and skin tone ensured I’d never be mistaken for a local.
That goal was even more impossible in Rostock, where my clothes (especially my shoes) and demeanor gave me away. So the best I could strive for was to avoid being immediately identified as an American.
To do that, I had to rid myself of my American accent in German. I might have succeeded … or not.
Although I’d had three years of German in high school, I started over from scratch in college; and that was in my sophomore year. I progressed quickly with lessons five days a week, and developed an appreciation for the language I’d hadn’t had before.
I must admit having an attractive and excellent university instructor with a lovely English accent made navigating the complexities of German adjective endings, noun genders, and irregular verbs much more bearable.
As my measly single year of college-level German progressed, the idea of studying abroad during my junior year really caught hold. But I worried that a single year of college level language wouldn’t suffice.
My professor told me I’d do fine if I took an intensive summer language course. URI would be acceptable (I was already in Providence studying at Brown University), but she said if I could get accepted to Middlebury College, that would be the best. I applied to Middlebury, and happily was accepted. So after completing my sophomore year I boarded a bus for Middlebury, Vermont.
I don’t know if it is still this way, but Middlebury College turned into a campus of many language schools during the summer. There was the German School, the Japanese School, the Russian School, and so on.
We in the German school all stayed together in one dorm, ate together, studied together, and played together. Upon arrival, I immediately had to sign a pledge that I would speak No English the entire nine weeks at school.
Lessons were rigorous, but there was a lot of fun, too. We put on a production of “Die Fledermaus,” watched movies in German, and had a lesson in German wine etiquette (the drinking age in Vermont at that time was 18).
Total immersion is The Way to learn a language, and not only did I begin to think in German, I began to dream in German … and I hadn’t even left the States yet!
Just two weeks after completing my studies at Middlebury, I flew to Frankfurt where I was met by my German friend, Natascha, who drove me south to Tübingen. During that drive, I learned about one of the ways English speakers fail to speak precise German.
There are several sounds in German that are not in English and must be learned. The obvious ones are the vowels with umlauts: ä, ö and ü. These simply must be learned and practiced, and I felt I reasonably mastered them by the time I got to Germany.
But there were some consonant sounds I still had to perfect. “Ein Bißchen,” as I learned it, or as is now spelled, “ein bisschen” means “a little bit.” Roughly, you pronounce it “eye-n biss-chen” (with the understanding that the “ch” is not a sound found in English).
In German, there are three sounds that many English speakers reduce to two, or even to one in some words:
s, ss, or ß = the same English s sound found in “stop,” “east,” and “seven”
sch = the same English sh sound found in, approximately, “English,” “shell,” and “usher”
ch = this is the sound many English speakers struggle with, because it is not found in English.
One way to make it is to form your mouth like you are going to make the ee sound (as in “beet”). Now simply breathe out without vocalizing, or make a long “h” sound like you are about to say “he” (with no vowel).
Now back to “ein bisschen.” Many English speakers, which included myself at the time, just mashed the ssch together into a plain old “sh” sound: “eye-n biSHen”.
Natascha drilled me from Frankfurt to Tübingen to make the two distinct sounds: SS followed by the German CH sound: “eye-n biss-CHen”). I practiced and practiced. Being aware of it, I heard many British and American students say “eye-n biSHen” throughout the year.
The other dead giveaway that you are not a native speaker is the R sound in German. Most Germans roll their R, but it is not at the tip of the tongue. Rather, they roll it at the back of their mouth.
Most English speakers roll their Rs on the tip of their tongues the way you might hear in Russia, Spain, or Finland. Rolling the r at the back of the mouth is difficult, so I would walk the streets of Tübingen, relaxing my jaw, wetting my palate, and practicing my rolled back-of-the-mouth r: rrrRRRrrr, rrrRRRrr, rrrRRRrrr.
As the year progressed, I would often be complimented on my accent, and when I’d ask if they could guess where I was from, Germans often guessed I came from countries other than the USA or the UK. I took this as a big compliment. There was one time I might have been mistaken for a German native … or not.
My friend Bill and I studied together over the year, first spending a semester in Tübingen, which was then in West Germany, then a semester in Rostock, still in East Germany at that time. At the beginning of the year, we made a pact never to speak English, except with Germans who wanted to practice their English.
In Tübingen, we may have been regarded as elitist by many of the other native English speakers when they gathered to smoke, drink, play cards, and speak English, but we were there to learn German.
One day in Rostock, Bill and I went to a restaurant. It was a large, cafeteria-style place, and as is common, we were seated at a table with four strangers (something I rather like, actually). Bill and I sat across from each other and chatted in German in between bites of food.
The four others were young men, maybe 18 or 19 years old, who looked like they had come off a construction site. They were wearing overalls with dirt stains, and they just stared at us while Bill and I ate and visited.
Finally, one blurted out, “Seid ihr Sachsen?!?” (“Are you guys Saxons?!?” … Saxons come from Saxony, which is an area of what was southern East Germany, including Leipzig and Dresden).
We laughed and answered, “no, we are from the USA.” “USA?” they repeated in disbelief. “Why would you come here?!?” We replied that we wanted to learn German and to come see things in East Germany for ourselves.
One fellow just looked at the floor, shaking his head in bewilderment repeating, “USA….USA…”
Anyway, we enjoyed chatting with the young men for the rest of our meal (why, why, why did I not take a picture of them and get their names?) and walked back to our dorm in high spirits at having been mistaken for native Germans. We really had done it! Or had we … ?
As we walked, an uncomfortable realization dawned on me. Whenever soccer teams from Leipzig, Dresden, or Karl-Marx Stadt came north to play Rostock, the fierce rivalry often boiled over into physical violence between rival fans at the train station.
“You know, Bill,” I realized, “had we actually been German, those may have been fighting words!” First, the guy used the informal form of “seid ihr” instead of the polite “Sind Sie” form to address us. In addition, if we hadn’t been Saxons, that could have been taken as an insult, and if we were Saxons, it could also have been an invitation to fight.
Oh well. Insult intended or not, I still am proud to have been accused of being German and remember the experience fondly.
Remembering Rostock, 1989 