privilege wasting, my laxing German phonetics

The pouting fades after I hear about stories like this and I am reminded that I shouldn’t take for granted the fact that I am even allowed to live in Germany and now speak German.

In recent years, Germany has become more progressive, compared to the majority of states in the USA. One example is in extending partner rights and protections to not only it’s citizens but to citizens of other certain nations who live in Germany. Since 2001, sexual orientation has no longer posed as an obstacle for people wanting to rubber stamp their shared lives with a government seal of approval. Just 4 years ago, couples with a registered partnership joined the ranks of married couples with the right to joint adoption and pension rights for widow(er)s. Language skills aren’t required for these folks -in the meantime.

What the US hasn’t done thus far is now a major hurdle for some German citizens. Those Germans who happen to have a loved one with citizenship outside of an EU country, the USA, Canada, South Korea or Japan are finding their families split in two places. Under new reform of the Zuwanderungsgesetz or Immigration Law, passed in March 2007, some German citizens are finding that they cannot bring their wives or husbands home with them until their spouses pass a basic language proficiency exam. No entry before she or he can say and define maybe a word like, Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung.

The unfair part of it all is that families from my country or Canada, with no citizenship in Germany, don’t have this obstacle. US citizens with a German work permit or the ability to show financial independence may bring their US passport-carrying spouses to Germany without subjecting them to a German language test prior to the move. Even, I, as a single, was allowed entry and residence without basic German knowledge all because I have a US passport.

Maybe it’s not that hard in Chile to find a German speaker, but I bet not too many people speak German in say, Uzbekistan. Based on the fact that the number of immigrants into Germany has recently sunk, I suspect it could be influenced by the scarcity of effective German learning resources in non-German speaking countries. My own ‘how-to-German’ story wasn’t without its privileges and still it was difficult.

So I learned on my own, after work. Jogging with German. Driving with German. I’d even learn German while on my work break mostly to make fun of myself and to humor my work colleagues who had a hard time understanding why I was even going through the trouble. After all, Alex speaks English.

Word spread between friends and acquaintances and suddenly I became the receptacle for all of their old German language material: books published in the 1960s to newer forms of learning methods – Treffpunkt Deutsch, Berlitz essential German, Lehr- und Übungsbuch der deutschen Grammatik, German MADE SIMPLE – the stack kept getting higher and higher. Some friends would later taunt me, testing if I was now convinced that German was a forsaken, loogie-hawking language. No doubt their imagery was marred by propagandaizing war films. I laughed with them, the treat of the day was listening to me repeat the German word for five over and over. foonf, no. funf, no. fuhnf..

I did this for a year in Florida. When I arrived in Munich you may be little surprised to know everything about my German stunk. I understood just as much as the time I visited Germany 18 months before and spoke with probably a 20-word vocabulary. Two days later, I was sitting in a class with 15 other foreigners repeating, Es macht Spaß, Deutsch zu lernen.

So I tell you this story from the comfort of my Munich apartment now with a lot more than 20 words of German in my noggin. I know German only because I live in Germany. There could have been no other way for me. My folks do not speak German. I took two years of high school Spanish because at the time I thought my future was in Florida. My major didn’t require a foreign language to receive a degree. German may have been in my distant heritage but it was not in my upbringing and certainly not in my sphere of influence in Sarasota.

Even with a few odds against me, I am happy to be a student in a German university and Alex and I are able to live together, having gone on record that we are responsible for each other during my stay. I hold a residence permit sticker in my passport all because I am American.

It’s hard not to feel disgusted with myself that I made even a slight fuss about learning German knowing there is a child in the world without her German dad, all because his foreign wife understandably doesn’t comprehend German.

Much like the US, Germany has a ways to go before they can get over its integration problems. It may think that it is keeping its language intact by keeping poor, ignorant, would-be immigrants out, but there is still work to be done for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation immigrants living in Germany without decent language skills. Keeping families apart is not the answer, maybe a little tolerance and the use of innovative teaching methods could be.

But you know, I can’t vote here so the only thing I can do is perhaps brush up on my umlauts, it’s the least I can do as a privileged American living in Germany.

Here are some on-line resources I found helpful:

• Practicing long and short ö
• Practicing long and short ü
• Practicing long and short ä
• If you need a visual on how to form your lips while saying ä, ö, ü, check out this site: Phonetics
  Choose the German flag, then Monophtonge. Then choose between vorn (front), zentral (middle), hinter (back) and one of the letters on the left.

I found the links about at this site here: Online German Lessons. There are plenty of other resources to brush up your German language featured on that site. My own German grammar pages are posted at www.lucidindeutschland.net/german_easy/

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