On the Road with Julie

Time to Read:

One of my linguistic highlights of my weeklong German language immersion in Bornheim happened when my teacher, Ludwig, and I went to a buffet restaurant for lunch during our visit to Bonn. It was an incredibly small moment in terms of time and general import in the goings on of day-to-day life, but, for my language learning journey, it was a milestone.

The restaurant was a delicious buffet and, anyone that knows me well, will not be surprised to hear that I accidentally took WAY too much. I tried to just take small scoops of each delicious looking thing that I selected. But there were a lot of delicious looking things that I ended up putting on my plate. Turns out that the “littleness” of a scoop does not matter so much if you just keep taking more of them. So, yea, I had leftovers. 

So, I needed a take-away container. 

Ludwig and I were eating at a table in the upstairs seating area. And the buffet, along with all of the potential take-away options, were far away from the linguistic sanctuary of my language teacher where we sat on the second floor.

But I was on a mission to get take-away containers, so I descended down to the hustle and bustle of the first floor…alone.

I went up to the cashier and said, “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”, first giving the coward’s route the good old college try. 

“Nein,” she responded with a kind, but decisively firm, look of unapologetic acceptance that we were standing at an impasse and it would have to be me that decided what happened next. 

‘All right – here goes nothing.’ I thought. 

I had already subjected my kind hosts, over the prior few days of my German language immersion, to reams of broken German sentences that had created a wonky patchwork of words that they had continuously decoded into actual real information, so, I figured, I had, at least, a chance at bridging the gap. With that little bit of confidence built from days spent in an all German environment where I had routinely managed to get information across, I was ready to step up to the task.  

I knew the words for “Do you have?”. I knew the word for “food”. And, over the course of my week here, I had newly learned the word for “thing” and the verb for “to take”. Now, my ability to appropriately conjugate the verb was questionable at best, but, I thought it was worth a try. 

So, I threw my mouth around the vocabulary like a wild lasso flying hopefully through the air, trying to catch something of substance. I took all of these incredibly relevant words and strung them together with the unearned confidence of an only slightly handy husband that insists he can easily handle the “minor plumbing issue” himself with a few pipecleaners and some duct tape. The sentence was a jerry-rigged hail mary and I threw it out there with reckless, but hopeful abandon. 

I’m pretty sure what I actually said amounted to something akin to, “You have food thing to take?” 

I watched the words I threw into the air as they landed in this German-speaker’s ears. And I waited with hopeful anticipation to see what kind of landing they made.

No sooner had the words escaped my mouth than I saw this wonderful look wash over her face. It was the same look that comes over the face of anyone that has had the simple satisfaction of playing catch and feeling the ball safely land across the distance into the solid grip of their glove. She caught it. I had succeeded. She knew what I was asking for! Yay! 

But, what made this small moment a little highlight of my trip was the other layer to that look on her face that just about melted my heart. We had known each other for approximately 4.5 seconds. And, in the first few seconds of our pseudo-acquaintanceship, she had looked at me with exactly the amount of interest that a cashier would show a random customer – that is to say, not much. But, here, in second number 4, a different look came over her face. It was subtle and, maybe I’m projecting with more vigor than a 1940’s newsreel at the movies, but, I swear, she was proud of me. Her once firm looking visage melted into a soft smile of recognition that I had just accomplished something that I, seconds before, hadn’t been sure that I could do. She reached out and touched my forearm as she nodded a clear “yes, we do have food things to take – and I’m gonna get one for you”. The way she reached out and touched my arm matched with the look on her face felt like a, “You did it. Way to go.” 

Our interaction lasted a total of maybe 30 seconds, but we had gone on a little journey together that encapsulated the whole of the language learning journey itself. It was the moment of being thrown in the water, flailing for a second and then, that first moment that you swing your arm around and productively grab water and propel yourself forward along the surface of the water, resisting the forces pulling you down under it. Once you have that feeling and know, physically know, that you can swim, everything changes.

When I climbed back upstairs with my bounty, I returned to my teacher with my head held a little higher than before. It was, in almost all ways, an insignificant and short moment, but, for me, it was a milestone.

I learned a lot during my week in Bornheim – a lot of grammar, a lot of new vocabulary a lot of pronunciation. But, linguistically speaking, I would say that, unequivocally, this transformation was my biggest takeaway – I have now reached the level of being able to confidently and openly speak contorted, broken German. I am officially on my way.