Notes from Germany, part 2

Soon after moving to Saarbrücken, I wrote my first post about the move, Notes from Germany, part 1. Four years later, I realized I never did a part two. Since I just moved to Heidelberg, now felt like a good juncture to write it. This was a larger scale move than the last one despite being within Germany, because it involved transporting a whole apartment full of furniture and stuff. But it felt a lot easier, partly because I could make my German roommate handle phone calls in German, and partly because my own German is so much better now. That's what the rest of this post is about (my German, not the roommate).

Between Saarland University and DeutschAkademie, I've taken a bunch of German classes^[1] in the last 4 years, and recently finished a B2.2 course. I've also done Duolingo basically every day since I moved here, and in about 20 days I'll hit a 1500 day streak on Duolingo, but after that I'm going to quit. I've been through the Duolingo German course twice, once the normal way and once on legendary mode, but I definitely maxed out on its usefulness a long time ago. In my case, all of this training translates to a level where I can talk about my politics and my work, do all my various medical appointments (GP, skin, gyno, dentist, etc.) exclusively in German,^[2] and—my personal favourite—tell off a man who tried to make fun of my mask until he apologized. Basically, being able to speak German at this level has massively improved my quality of life in Germany. I'm not confined to my little research bubble and can talk to real people in my community about real things. And it also lets me connect with Germans at a much deeper level, even ones with whom I talk English most of the time.

As a nonbinary person, however, German has been kind of challenging. The obvious issue I keep running into is that German is aggressively gendered and has no convenient singular-they equivalent. "Wie gendert man dich?" (How do I gender you?) is a question I regularly get, to which I have no perfect answer. Also, all the possible solutions (pronoun avoidance, alternating genders, neopronouns like dey, xier, per, etc.) are ones I learned from non-binary Germans, not the German classroom. It is well-established that the language classroom is full of various cultural ideologies, including what kinds of genders, relationships and family structures exist and are intelligible to other people, ideologies that leave no room for people like me. The curriculum also typically assumes that learners have a sense of belonging to a single country that they're from and know things about, whereas I'm a literal Vagrant with a fraught relationship with like three different countries I'm plausibly "from." Most of this isn't necessarily very important for immediate needs like getting groceries, and I feel lucky to have had wonderful teachers who were open to hearing that I was non-binary and did not "correct" the way I choose to gender myself in German. But there just isn't room in a status quo classroom to teach me queer German slang, or to help me express myself in a way that reads as queer to other queer people, which is the German I need long term.

The other set of language ideologies at play as an L2 learner are related to standardization. We get taught high German, which does next to nothing for my understanding of the gardener or my roommate's parents or my friend's conversations with his football team, because all of these people speak in various dialects we get no training in. And when we speak, whether it's in the classroom or outside, we get praise for approximating the "standard" accent as closely as possible. Don't get me wrong, I'm only human and I love a compliment (and recently I've been getting a lot of them on my German!). I just feel sad as a linguist about the hierarchy it reflects, where my more convincingly "native" accent in German gets me more points than someone who sounds different but can express themself in a much wider range of circumstances than I can.

Once again, I have so much respect for L2 English learners at a level I really didn't have before moving to Germany and learning German. I have a whole new appreciation for this highly memed scene from Modern Family:

I'm funny and smart and sexy in English, and in German, I'm a shadow of myself. It's probably a big part of why I still want to move back to Vancouver despite all the linguistic and social (and professional!) progress I've made here in Germany. Until then, though, Heidelberg is a beautiful city, and I have to admit I'm enjoying it much more than Saarbrücken.

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