Wie bitte?

Last Sunday I woke up suddenly saturated with East Berlin’s neurotic pursuit of the zeitgeist. It had all started on Friday in one of the cities countless cafés. I had gone up to the counter only to be confronted with a hipsterbot, who looked identical to the army of cooltaumatons that inhabit the capital’s Flohmärkte and art galleries. In fact, I’m sure that as I write, there’s a seriously ironic lab somewhere that cultivates these fashionable creatures in little petri dishes, using samples from vintage adidas tops. The specimen at the café had dark hair with a short round retro fringe and was wearing a top with seventies inspired prints in the only colours available during that decade: yellow, orange and brown. She was a hipster blueprint. She also looked a lot like me, or I looked a lot like her. I am of course no replicant. I am at least a Nexus-7.

Learning a language is like bringing up a child - no matter how many you have already, the new arrival will always be demanding. By the time you are onto your fourth, you expect it to be demanding, you know it will be demanding, you are absolutely certain that it will be demanding, yet this is no consolation. Nobody ever found solace in cynicism. Total immersion is the only option to get to grips with a language’s nuts and bolts, with its syntactic soul, morphological contours and semantic depths. The new language, initially just white noise, slowly metamorphoses, first into individual words, flashes of meaning discerned here and there, and then later into fully fledged sentences, no longer part of a cacophony.

I am currently trying to immerse myself in German, in the hope that it will be my fourth adopted language, joining those other demanding brats (Danish, English and Spanish). Learning a language is obviously not the same as total immersion. You can learn a language without plugging yourself into the Grammarmatrix. You dutifully attend your language course every day, then go home and switch off. But if you are in the Grammarmatrix, that is not an option. You can never switch off. Once you have looked below the surface, you can never return to your safe monolingual existence. You are provided with some rudimentary building blocks - a set of Duplo - to start with. You are given some essential regular verbs and their conjugations in the present tense, the basic (nominative) personal pronouns, some numbers and a couple of possessives  thrown in for good measure. Familiar now with a few of these building blocks, you start seeing them everywhere. Duplo pieces are simple, clumsy, childish. You long for proper Lego, the tiny adaptable pieces that constitute your native tongue, and admire the beautiful, and often unintelligible constructions you constantly come across. I am currently at the Duplo stage, enthusiastically mashing my blocks together like a toddler dreaming of high towers and aeroplanes.

I will have my tower.

English is the current lingua franca of the world, the default code for international business, science and technology, just as French and Latin used to be in past times. A lingua franca is a language used by two people who do not share a mother tongue, particularly if this is an altogether third language, separate from both speaker’s vernacular. Native English speakers often forget this, which makes for interesting encounters at airports, cafés and historical ruins between a tourist who speaks English as their first language and a non plussed local who is familiar with the international variety.

In this case it was an exchange between an Anglosaxon lady, attired in her choicest Marks & Spencer twinset and H. Samuel pearls, and a German cashier with the sort of expression you presumably get after standing behind an airport sandwich counter 12 hours a day. Twinset lady had picked up a bottle of water and wanted to know whether it was still. This predictably drew a blank stare from the frankly unimpressed Teutonic sales assistant, and communication was not further improved by the Brit’s tendency to mumble her words and speak in hushed tones, as if she might upset the cheese and tomato sandwiches languishing on the counter in front of her.

She spoke as if British, and not International English, was the lingua franca and kept repeating “still” as if it were a mantra that would hopefully reach the exasperated person in front of her. “Without gas?” would the exasperated person say, “Natural?” she would venture.  Her sparring partner refused to concede - this was after all her mother tongue, how dare this pimpled foreign youth tell her how to speak it?. This tug of war continued for a bit before twinset lady half-heartedly capitulated. “And how much is it then?” she sighed. “Zwee zirty”. “Beg a pardon?” And without taken her eyes from the customer, the German girl reached for a piece of cardboard behind the till upon which she had written  € 3.30 in black marker pen.