Call me the Lager Blogger

I’m a little over a year into my journey towards German fluency, and I still haven’t advanced much beyond the realm of basic conversations.

The fact that I’ve made the choice to take on this challenge of learning a language, have basically devoted my life to it — so much that I’m blogging about it—yet am still talking like a five-year-old can be discouraging.

How do you cope with such a massive undertaking, and stay motivated despite the lack of real progress?

When my wife and I decided to move to Germany, we figured it would be at least a four-year trip. Besides conveniently being the length of Trump’s presidency, and us wanting to stay as far from that debacle as possible, we figured that was approximately the amount of time it would take to achieve a comfortable level of fluency with the language.

Four years! Can you imagine working on anything else every day for four years?

How long was the last big project you did at work? Maybe a month-long push? After which you were so burned out that you needed a week of vacation? That’s cute.

We live in a world of instant gratification, in which any hobby can be learned in just a few hours on YouTube. This means that many crafts that were once lifelong pursuits can now be achieved by anyone with a casual interest. Want to be a professional photographer? Enable Portrait mode on your iPhone. Want to bake artisan bread? Tech bros are doing it. Want to start your own winery? You’ll need a bit of financial capital, but NBA star Dwyane Wade seems to be doing pretty well.

Language learning, however, doesn’t work that way. You can’t say, “Well, I’ve got some extra time this weekend. Maybe I’ll learn a language.”

The result is that no one sticks with a language long enough to actually learn anything meaningful.

We live in this digital world where we’re more connected than ever to other cultures, yet no one is learning languages because of that very same reason — all the distractions are just as accessible.

Here’s what usually happens. You start learning a language, but then something comes up. Maybe you get bored, or frustrated by the lack of progress, and quit. Maybe your schedule gets busy, and you skip a day, which turns into a week, which turns into rationalizing — you convince yourself that “the basics” were all you needed anyway. Plus you just watched this really cool video about underwater basket weaving, so you impulse-bought a SCUBA tank. Guess language learning will have to take a back seat.

I’ve experienced all those same hurdles.

My first difficulty came when I arrived in Germany, and got overwhelmed at just how many words there were. And, sure, every language has a lot of words, but German was especially daunting. I noticed that sometimes people would just stick two existing words together and invent a new word. This meant that I’d come across words that I couldn’t even look up in a dictionary — because they were made up — and unlike English, that was totally allowed.

As if that wasn’t enough, you often don’t realize, even in your native language, how many different ways there are to say the same thing.

Take the English verbs talk and speak, which have direct German counterparts reden and sprechen. I’ll bet you can’t articulate the difference between them, or even come up with an example where one is appropriate and not the other. I’m not saying you don’t know what they mean — of course you know how to use them, because you were raised with the language. But any outside learner, if they’re at all like me, will just be angry at whoever decided we needed two different words for unnecessarily complicating things so much.

I was so sure that a Bibliothek was a library, and then I started seeing the word Bücherei pop up everywhere, which literally means the exact same thing. I wanted to curse the German language so badly, but I didn’t know any curse words yet, and besides, there were probably so many different options for what I wanted to say that it would’ve just made matters worse.

The new words kept coming, and they wouldn’t stop. My German classes weren’t even helping, because I didn’t know whether I was in fact going to a Klasse, an Unterricht or a Stunde.

But then… I had a revelation. There was a turning point when I began to recognize words I’d seen before, while seeing fewer and fewer new words. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, because I began to see the language as a finite, quantifiable thing. I understood that there were still probably like eight different words for rhubarb that I didn’t know, but I was comforted by the idea that I would get to the end eventually.

As you go along, you’ll continue to have these realizations that progress is happening — it’s just not always in the areas you expect.

Language learning is a funny thing, because the only real tried and true method is exposure. It’s not possible to deliberately learn something — you can’t force a word into your brain and say, “There, I know it now,” — so you have to count on your brain to learn things passively. Sure, you can guide it in a direction by studying something specific, but your brain will learn what it wants to learn. That’s part of the reason I have no problem with Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung — which I never see, because it means speed limit, and I don’t drive — but I still mix up Anschluss (connection) and Abschluss (completion), which seem to appear everywhere.

The thing is, you never really know what you know at any given time. Once in a while, you’ll have a flash of recognition — you’ll overhear something on a German radio station and realize that you know that word! You’re not sure where your brain picked up the strangely specific term for that branch of German parliament, but you don’t argue — results are results.

It’s those moments of incremental progress that keep me studying every day. Sure, it’s several years of my life that I’m missing out on by not learning waterskiing, rock balancing or how to play the ukulele, but in the end, I’m convinced it’s worth it.

The Deutsches Wort des Tages today is…

Lager is a word you’re probably familiar with, because you’ve most likely seen it on a beer menu. Lager is in fact the most popular style of beer in Germany, and is characterized by its low-temperature fermentation process.

The history of the word is a little interesting, though. It all began in the Middle Ages when Bavarian brewers discovered that their beer continued to ferment while being stored in ice caves during the winter. When they took their barrels out from nature’s beer cellars in the spring, they discovered a much improved, smooth, mellow tasting brew.

Now, here’s the thing about Germans: when coming up with new words, they call it as they see it. They don’t try to be frilly or fancy; they name things in the most blatant, obvious way possible.

Sloth? Faultier (lazy animal). Glove? Handschuh (hand shoe). Lightbulb? Glühbirne (incandescent pear). Why create a new word if there’s a perfectly good phrase we can use to describe it?

So Lager was called Lager from the existing verb lagern, which means to store. This was the beer that needed to be stored for a while.

The beer isn’t the only thing named after storage. A warehouse is also a Lager. belagern means to lay siege on something, which carries the sense of “staying in the same place for a while,” since you basically hang out in front of the city, castle, or whatever you’re attacking until it gives up. A camp is also a Lager, which means, unfortunately, that World War II had Konzentrationslager, which were basically viewed as storage facilities.

Tut mir leid, aber momentan sind die Monster High Dolls nicht auf Lager. (I’m sorry, but right now the Monster High dolls are out of stock.)

A related English word is lair, a pretty clear connection in the sense that a lair is an encampment or hide-out.

So next time you’re hanging out in your secret lair, knocking back a few cold ones with your friends, impress them with the story of how the beer you’re drinking and the cave you’re holed up in have a common etymological root.