Humble Pie

Hello, children of God!

This post regards two points of information. Firstly, I arrived safely in Berlin on Saturday (minus my bag). However, the joke was on the airline, because they had to bring my MIA suitcase to my apartment door... which happens to be on the 5th floor... in a building with no elevator. And believe me, I used every pound of my 50 pound allowance. Bwa ha ha.

Secondly, one of my friends asked me what the title of my blog means. Flashback to 9th grade German class. 15 of us sat in a ridiculously warm classroom in late August, looking at posters with the lyrics of "Der Schnitzelbank" and the castle Neuschwannstein. When class started, the teacher asked us why we made the decision to take German. Most responded that they had a personal connection to the language, that their family came from Germany or their siblings had taken German. However, one student responded, "Well, I figured English is a Germanic language, so it will be easy to learn."

The logic seemed to be viable. Not only does German have a similar sentence structure, but they also have similar words. Poster in German is das Poster, video is das Video, glass in German is das Glas... even some of their sayings are the same. You can say that it's raining cats and dogs or that someone has been with you through thick and thin. After four years of high school German, you start thinking of German and English like the twins in The Parent Tra: two identical languages raised in different environments causing some idiosyncratic personality traits, but not enough differences to cause immediate suspicion when they decide to exchange households.

As you might guess by comparing this logic to a Disney movie, this theory does not hold up in everyday usage. In fact, the number of similarities gives you a false sense of security, which sometimes results in incredulous looks and a "Wie, bitte?" ("WHAT ARE YOU SAYING, YOU CRAZY AMERICAN GIRL?!" I am editorializing a bit). If you directly translate "I am cold" in German, you are actually saying that you are a cold person. If you want second helpings you say, "Yes, please" not "Yes, thank you," because "Thank you" is an indication that you are finished.

The instance, from which my blog title stems, occurred during my first summer in Germany. I was at a party, listening to a discussion about the changes to the German academic system. In addition to knowing very little about the topic, my vocabulary was somewhat limited. One person turned to me and asked if I understood what they were talking about. I smiled and said in German, "It's all Greek to me."

He turned to me with the look of confusion, which I would soon anticipate every time I spoke that first summer. "If you think they are speaking Greek, then you understand less than you think."

Ouch. I mentally put a "NOT FRIEND" check mark next to his name in my head.

Later, I looked up what an equivalent phrase in German would be: "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof" or "I only understand train station." As I marked down the new phrase in my journal, I realized that there were going to be many times that I was only going to understand train station, considering most German 8 year olds had a larger vocabulary than I do. Although it's frustrating when a little girl on the U-Bahn says a word I don't know, it's good to know that after eight years of studying German, I'm still learning new things, even if it means I have to eat some humble pie. And no, I have NO idea how one says "to eat humble pie" in German. I'll get back to you on that.