Ich freue mich darauf

In the final days of our honeymoon, at a Trattoria overlooking a beautiful, rocky Croatian beach, my wife got a phone call saying she’d gotten a job in Berlin. This was good news.

I was born and raised in San Francisco, and it’ll always hold a place in my heart. But after seeing what the tech boom did to the average cost of living over the past few years, it was time to get out. I just couldn’t in good conscience pay 18 dollars for a sandwich. This wasn’t going to be a permanent breakup, just a “let’s give it some time” sort of thing — a few years at least, if that’s what it would take for The City to get its sandwich prices sorted out.

So after I got married, moving abroad became a more realistic option, since work visas in most countries automatically extend to spouses, which meant that initially, only one of us would need to secure a job.

My wife had been applying to places all over Europe in the hopes of landing something that would help us start our new life adventure. London would’ve been a fun option — the English-speaking population and big city vibe would’ve made it an easy transition. We had also looked into Stockholm, a growing tech hub where English is also pretty universal.

But now, apparently we were going to Berlin. The language situation isn’t ideal, but we could learn German. How hard could it be?

Immediately after our honeymoon, my wife hopped on a plane to Berlin, and I went home to the U.S. to pack up our life and start studying.

I welcomed this assignment with open arms. Part of the reason I wanted to move to Europe was to expose myself to new languages. I had long been jealous of bilinguals, which doesn’t sound like anything that special if you’re European, but for Americans is quite a novel thing. The American school system gives you three years of a second language in high school, enough in most languages to ask where the bathroom is, but not nearly enough to have anything resembling a conversation. I longed for the ability to communicate with whole new parts of the world that a second language would enable. But mostly, I was inspired by the awkward eavesdropping incidents I would read about on the internet. If I could catch just one random person on the subway talking shit about me, it would make this whole language journey worth it.

And now that the destination had been decided, I vowed that I was going to dive in headfirst, and not come back until I, too, was a card-carrying member of the exclusive bilinguals club.

This blog is a chronicle of my journey with the German language.

I arrived in Berlin last January, and immediately enrolled in language classes. Since then, I’ve used every language-learning app and method you can imagine: podcasts, YouTube videos, books, dubbed versions of American movies, and occasionally talking to real humans.

It’s really a great time to learn a language right now, with the state of technology and the app economy. It seems like every day now a new app is released that claims to have “cracked the code” for human knowledge retention. Our algorithm has language learning down to a science, it will claim. But, as fellow learners out there probably know, the effectiveness of a given method can vary from person to person. An app that makes its living by drilling new vocabulary into your head might be useless for a user who needs a more tangible experience. Everyone learns differently, because language learning is really not a science, and the best method is quite simply the one that works for you.

My personal experience has been a series of trials and errors, but despite it all, somehow I’ve ended up with hundreds of German words, verb conjugations and adjective declinations floating around in my head. I still don’t know enough to have much in the way of meaningful conversations, but I can at least look back on my learning experience and give you some of the highlights.

I figure I should also start this blog with a couple disclaimers: first and foremost, that it will not help you learn German. I am not a teacher, nor will I pretend to be. And while this blog is about the act of learning German, it’s more about the narrative of my journey. Fellow language learners out there, I hope you can relate and/or sympathize with some of it. Monolingual friends, I hope you leave here thankful that you can live a life where you don’t have to have angst every time your phone rings, for fear that someone on the other end will start talking German at you. How I miss those days.

I also want to just take a moment to plug language learning in general. If you’ve ever thought about doing it, but have yet to muster up the ambition to get started, 2019 is your chance. The apps I referenced earlier are pretty much all free up to a certain point, which gives you the chance to try different methods, or even different languages, to see which one speaks to you. Also, there’s the health aspect: studies have shown that bilinguals maintain better cognitive function than monolinguals as the body naturally declines with age. So, do you want to be old and a dummy? Or are you going to join me on this exciting journey?

Anyway, on to the Deutsches Wort des Tages. Every post, I’m going to highlight a specific word or phrase of the day — one that I either just learned, or that I just happen to be thinking about that day for some reason.

Today we have…

sich freuen is a fun verb to start with, because it doesn’t really have an English counterpart. It means more or less to be happy, or to make oneself happy, and there really isn’t a word in English that accomplishes all that as a verb — happy is always an adjective, used in conjunction with little helper words like is. But isn’t it so much easier when one word does the job of two?

I find myself realizing this sort of thing a lot — I’ll notice that something in English is really quite inconvenient once I learn the German equivalent. But of course it’s an observation I never would have made if I hadn’t been learning German. It makes you think about how much you blindly accept the language that you were raised on.

I was getting a ride home from a couple German friends after softball practice one night (yes, Germany has softball), and on the way they had to stop to tanken. Then, out of curiosity, they asked me how to say tanken in English, and I responded that I didn’t know. Put gas in the car? Fill up the car? I couldn’t think of a way to say it in less than four words. You never realize how busted the old way is until you experience the new hotness.

But back to sich freuen.

It’s an interesting verb because you can add a preposition to it and change literally everything. sich freuen über means to be happy about something, but sich freuen auf means to look forward to something. So you really have to listen carefully when you hear a German drop one in a sentence, because that one little word can completely change the meaning.

Ich freue mich, dass ihr mich hier auf meinem Blog begleiten könntet. (I’m glad that you could all join me here on my blog.)
Ich freue mich auf unsere gemeinsame Blogreise. (I’m looking forward to our blog journey together.)

In the course of my studying, something I catch myself doing fairly regularly is that I’ll start to consider why the English version is the way that it is, and whether the German way doesn’t just make a whole lot more sense. The case of sich freuen is a prime example. After all, sich freuen über and sich freuen auf deal with two very related ideas. You’re happy — it’s just that in one case, you’re happy about a thing that is currently happening, and in the other, about a thing that’s happening soon. Really, the only weird phrase in this whole mess is the English look forward to, which on paper doesn’t have anything at all to do with being happy, but just carries that connotation because colloquially we’ve decided it does.

I guess the overarching lesson here is to question everything in language, not because you really have a choice in what words to use or not use — languages are pretty set in stone, after all — but because sometimes deeper inspection can uncover some meanings and relationships that you may not have realized were there. One of my goals with this blog will be to bring some of those to light.

You should really consider yourselves lucky that I didn’t take you down the complete rabbit hole that I went down in the course of my studying. If you go deep enough, you’ll find that freuen is derived from the same Indo-European root as the English word frog.

Anyway, I hope you found this first entry enlightening, or at the very least entertaining. For now, ich muss los, because it’s January in Berlin and I need to go out and take care of some things before the sun sets at 3:00 pm.

Tschau!