This week in German class…

We have some new students in class: a Spanish graphic designer and electronic musician, a Bosnian and a Thai woman (professions unknown). The Bosnian sat next to the Serbian and they seemed to get along fine. Another student asked them about their languages and if they could understand each other and they said yes, that in most of the former Yugoslavian countries they spoke the same language, although sometimes they are differentiated for political reasons. The exceptions were Macedonia and Slovenia.

The last vestiges of the former Yugoslavia finally disappeared only last year, when Serbia and Montenegro broke into two different countries. Probably, Kosovo will break off from Serbia as well. This will make a total of seven countries out of the former Yugoslavia. If things keep going like this, we’ll probably eventually have another four new countries: Ser, Bia, Monte, and Negro. Not to mention the little-known Republics of Ko, So, and Vo.

All kidding aside, I wish I could converse with my classmates, as I find this area of the world very interesting, having had so little contact with it (other than a 3-day visit in 1990). I wonder what they think about all the war and political changes they have lived through, and all the ethnic tensions that led to the wars, especially when we now have representatives of several of the different warring groups all studying together in this class. For example, I would like to ask Elvira, a Serb, why she always introduces herself to new classmates as “from Yugoslavia,” or more rarely, “from the former Yugoslavia,” only admitting she’s from Serbia when pressed for more information.

I think the books we use in class are really quite good. The authors came up with many clever ways of getting around the problem of having to make a language book for students with no other language in common. However, there are some cultural barriers we have come up against which I think may never have occurred to the authors. Yesterday, we had to explain Mozart to the Thai student, who had never encountered the cultural icon mentioned in a story in our book. Then, I was partnered with the Iraqi to work on an exercise in using prepositions and the dative case. The dative was no problem for this Arabic-speaker, it was the drawing that got him.

The activity went like this. Mohammed was given a stick-figure drawing of a room with a few things in it, and I got a drawing of an empty room, consisted of a box in the center representing the back wall and four lines coming out of its corners, creating ceiling, floor, and two more walls. He was supposed to describe the contents of the room to me in relation to one another (e.g., the table is next to the wall, the glass is on the table, etc.) so that I could draw it. This started out fine, but then he started looking over at my drawing and saying in great consternation, “but the table goes in the middle of the room! On the floor!” “It is in the middle of the floor,” I would explain. And then “I said the key is under the table and behind the chair!” “It is under and behind,” I would point out, getting a little annoyed. But then the problem revealed itself: “That’s the floor, there,” he tried to explain to me, pointing at what was quite clearly the back wall of the drawing of the room. “That’s the middle wall,” I corrected him. “Aaaaaaaahhhh,” he said, in a moment of possible enlightenment. So then we switched roles. All of his objects were drawn two-dimensionally in a pile on what he now knew was the floor, so that it looked like some terrible accent involving a stampeding giant dinosaur might have occurred, but everything was in the right order, at least.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe.