Elefant Talk

In which the author retreats from the horror of here with a little soupçon of there.

Among my various struggles, large and small, is the matter of how to organize my time to accommodate a ludicrous array of hobbies. I’m better at this than I was as a young fella, but only because over the years, as the sound of Time’s wingéd chariot has rattled ever nearer behind me, I’ve found myself increasingly endowed with the wherewithal to ruthlessly cut down those pursuits that I deemed mere flirtations, which, lets me honest, was about 98% of them. Such are the perquisites of age. But even the svelte version of my life is a wobbly, flabby mess which constantly threatens to take a big dump on something truly meaningful. I’m sorry, I can’t come to your dad’s funeral; I’ve got to build a paper mâché mountain for my model railroad layout.¹

Of course, one of the remaining hobbies is writing. My commitment to the written word waxes and wanes, but I’ve never not wanted to turn it into—at a bare minimum—a side hustle. Doing so requires a degree of focus and consistency that is as foreign to me as vulcanology is to a puppy, so I do have to admit from time to time that I don’t really have time to be researching and writing on current events every fortnight. It takes a fair bit of effort to pump out anything more than a screed, and even though I believe we’re facing an existential threat to our republic, I have to retreat every now and again to rest and refit. This is just such a week.

So instead I want to catch you up on the state of what has become—in spite of my better judgement—my most consuming hobby: language learning. I say “language learning” instead of “German” because I’ve added, at a low simmer, Dutch. The language of the Netherlands arrived purely on a whim; after much self-exhortation to get excited about Spanish, I stuck a finger into Dutch and pulled out a plum: God himself designed this language out of leftover scraps of both German and English, and as such I find it immediately familiar and comfortable and a wonderful window into the nature of what a language family actually is.²

I’m sure a few folks might think I’m off my nut, diving into something like this in middle age like I’d just suddenly decided to become a champion skier or a nuclear physicist. If you’re one of these, congratulations, you’re right on the money: I am indeed off my nut. But that’s a lifelong affliction, and I have to have faith that the universe is serving me tools I will one day find a use for. Admittedly, I have not yet found a worthwhile purpose for my knowledge of, say, 13th century French motets, but my quasi-quixotic pursuit of music more generally has produced some of my life’s most wonderful moments—as well as a few of its most harrowing and humiliating stories,³ but then, what are we without the full range of human experience, am I right?

I won’t defend my language study with talk of how intellectual pursuits are exercise for the brain. It’s true, and it’s also true that I took up German to offset my obsession with crossword puzzles, which, while fun, don’t produce anything of lasting value. But y’all know this already and I’m not writing bullet-point based articles for Self magazine here. No indeed, I’m writing interminable wending sentences comprised of every English word I’ve ever encountered in a life spent in large part digesting books in search of more of them. Anyway, if it hadn’t been language it would have been mathematics, and as much as I love esoterica, not one of you would stand for two-thousand word essays about how the Mandelbrot set is simply the set of values of c in the complex plane for which the orbit of the critical point z = 0 under iteration of the quadratic map…

Well that’s as far as I can go with that unless I relearn LaTeX. So, onward.

In spite of all the times you repeated the myth (you know which one) about Rod Stewart, this is what he was really doing with his time.

Now, I have some things to say about language and thought which stray very much into Chomskian territory, but as I’m approaching the length of a typical Newsweek article and I haven’t even gotten to the point yet,⁴ I’m going to stick with one question—a question I’ve carried around with me for a very long while: do bilingual people think in their adopted languages, or are they always translating? I’ve asked this of a few bilingual friends, and I tend to get quizzical looks or rambling, off-topic answers in response. Not that my bilingual friends are stupid or something, but I suspect it takes a special kind of obsessive to dwell on such matters rather than simply learning what’s in front of me.

Es ist mir scheißegal.⁵ I think about these sorts of things. And I think, after two and a half years of fairly intensive study, that I can venture some guesses.

There are, as you may be aware, four aspects to learning a language. To wit: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Each presents its own intrinsic challenges, and I present them here in order of my own capabilities (vis German; my Dutch, in spite of its relative simplicity, is that of a four-year old). It’s hard for me to find people to converse with in German, so in that aspect I’ve had the least experience. I read and write daily, and usually listen to something—a podcast or music or a YouTube video; occasionally a movie or TV show. Reading and writing allow one to go at one’s own pace, so I tend to find them less frustrating than listening, where you can only spend so much time with a word before an avalanche of others comes crashing down on top of you. Listening often feels like trying to stop the tide.

Point being that although I struggle with speaking and can usually only catch the gist of spoken German, I can write effectively and I can read with what often feels like real fluency. I still need to consult a dictionary once or twice in a paragraph, but in a pinch I can usually get along without—like a child wobbling along a shaky path on a bicycle; alarming, but shit fire look at him go! So, do I think in German while reading?

Sometimes, yeah. I don’t generally need to translate what I’m reading into English. Contrarywise, the meaning of most sentences is fairly clear upon merely registering the German words.⁶ This is particularly true—and wicked exciting—in passages that describe things; appearances but particularly dynamic activities. A sentence such as “Als sie auf dem Boden landeten, lockerte sich der feste Griff für einen Moment, und das reichte Goldstein, um den Angreifer seine Rechte und die Remington mit voller Wucht gegen die Schläfe zu donnern”⁷ sets up a mental picture for me before the English translation even begins to arrive in my mind. In truth, it’s much more time-consuming to actually translate. I do it often anyway; it’s good practice and forces you to pay attention to details. But it’s not necessary.

What’s really wild are those occasions where I recognize and understand the German word even as the English equivalent fails to come when called. The first time I became aware of this I was struggling to remember the translation of the word “unwiderruflich.” I could conjure up a wordy, rambling translation if I was forced to at gunpoint⁸—not amenable to being recalled?—but doing so in real-world scenarios would probably be a waste of effort. I get the meaning, so let’s move on. Of course, it’s no wonder I couldn’t conjure up the English: irrevocable is a seldom-used word and, with condolences to its fans, a sounds a bit like a small animal tumbling down a staircase.

Reading German without translating is frankly exhilarating. I’m not there yet in writing, except for common phrases and very simple sentences. I’m miles away as a listener, and my speech sounds like someone shoving aluminum cans into a blender. But in spite of my handicaps I can, with effort, communicate in all four modes, and off my nut though I may be, communication is kinda what we humans do. It’s why I write these absurd missives. I’m not great at expanding my audience here from Red Clay Bestiary headquarters, but let me tell you this: I’ve been writing, for a year and a half, at a rate of one or two paragraphs a day, extended stories (40-60 entries each) from my life, auf Deutsch,⁹ and I’ve actually managed to pick up a tiny audience, who, in spite of my fractured German, tune in daily to find out what happens next.

I never expected this, but like I said, one has to have faith that the universe distributes the things it does for a reason, and even though you might not be able to understand what it’s telling you now, you might tomorrow. And if you never do, es ist mir scheißegal. It’s just fucking fun. What else ya gonna do?

1. In truth I surrendered model railroading at 12, but every now and again fate reveals a glimpse of a particularly sultry layout and find myself fantasizing about glistening rails and buxom tank cars.

2. English, Dutch, and German are, along with Swedish (in which I have also dabbled), Danish, Norwegian, Yiddish, Scots, and a half dozen other mostly northern European languages (Afrikaans is a notable outlier) all members of the Germanic language family, as all descended from a hypothesized Proto-Germanic root.

3. Musical failure, I will note, is far less devastating than—to pick a recent incident at random—driving a tractor through the wall of a friend’s barn.

4. Not to mention that I’m about as qualified to talk about Noam Chomsky as I am about particle colliders.

5. A favorite Teutonic phrase of mine, this effectively translates to “fuck it.”

6. It is difficult to avoid translating, of course. Just like it’s difficult to not think of an elephant.

7. “As they landed on the ground, the tight grip loosened for a moment, and that was enough for Goldstein to slam his right hand and the Remington into the attacker's temple with full force.” — Goldstein, Volker Kutscher, p. 173

8. I expect this will never happen but whether or no, I now understand better the pauses and grasping for language you will occasionally hear from translators.

9. In the Subreddit r/WriteStreakGerman, where one can write a daily entry and expect it to be corrected by a native German within a day or two. The lesson I learned through sticking with it is that once you get beyond two hundred days or so, the natives will start taking you seriously and you will find yourself spending more time chatting with them than writing your little stories.