From German Class to Berlin’s Streets
By Jackie Jauregui
Unglaublich is the German word for unbelievable — the best way to describe visiting Germany for the first time and communicating with people in a language I first started learning in college.
Especially when I was able to go to a shop in the Schöneberg district and feel at ease.
The boxes of ink for fountain pens in front of me were like the alphabet building blocks of my childhood — colorful, with some easily understandable to me and some not.
“Wie viel kostet es?” I asked without thinking. (How much does it cost?)
The answer was, in fact, too much. I decided on something else, and when the shop attendant rang me up saying my total was “seven Euros and fifty cents,” she quickly apologized for speaking English — since I had addressed her in German.
As an American who has been learning German for just three years, I would have never expected a German to say Entschuldigung (pardon me) for speaking my native language to me, instead of their own.
Berlin is known as a multicultural city, whose 940,000 foreign-born residents come from more than 170 countries. Though there’s no clear data about how many Berliners speak English, it is a prevalent second language, with many signs, restaurant menus, and often even public transit announcements offered in both German and English.
In my experience, language learners wanting to practice their German in Berlin need to be adamant about using it as often as possible, because it’s easy to travel here without needing to use it.
I don’t have other colleagues with German experience on the Berlin Beyond Borders editorial team, so I’ve mainly practiced my German ordering at restaurants. In more tourist-centered areas such as Holzmarktstraße in Mitte, service workers have automatically spoken to me in English.
According to Rolando Montanchez, a Peruvian restaurant manager who has lived in the city for seven years, sometimes they are German speakers that want to flex their English muscles and sometimes they are foreign-born workers with stronger English skills. It’s stressful to lack fluency, but I push myself to speak German through my mistakes.
What’s more challenging than being understood is to understand. Luckily, German speakers have never been more accessible. From the prerecorded overhead announcements at the U- and S-Bahn stations to catching up at a café with friends who now live here, I’ve been improving through keeping my ears open and piecing together the words I know.
More than that, I’ve been exposed to the written language absolutely everywhere. I brought my habit of reading everything around me to Berlin and it really is the best practice. My favorite aspect of the culture, that I’ve been able to absorb this way, is German humor — which I would say exists, but is very subtle. And much of it is text-based.
For example, the gift shop at the Cecilienhof villa in Potsdam has a few minimalist postcards with ‘inspirational’ quotes. One with earnest commentary from Spanish painter Salvador Dalí reads: “Was mich interessiert ist Geld (What interests me is money).” A Euro and 50 cents
doesn’t accurately measure the joy I felt to have understood the postcard.
That is all to say, sometimes I look at sentences in job advertisements and go back to being four years old, building structures with alphabet blocks. When I speak, I build with the ones I recognize and can grab the quickest. When I listen, it’s as though I’m reconstructing a preexisting — sometimes much too sophisticated — structure. And when I read, sometimes the
block combinations don’t make much sense.
But I am not without resources to figure out how to build better. Thanks to the online bilingual dictionary LEO, the translator app DeepL, and our course researcher-interpreter Vanessa, I feel more confident going at it again the next time. It all comes down to making the next attempt. And
I consider it a privilege to not just have the opportunity to practice these language skills, but to finally live in German. Unglaublich.
Jackie Jauregui is an undergraduate student of Linguistics, Spanish, German, and Journalism at University of California, Santa Barbara who is reporting from Berlin this summer.
