Today the little DuoLingo app told me I’ve been spending way too much time on my phone trying to learn German, and then French, and then back to German again. It’s helpful, I can read a lot more than last time I spent any time in Germany, but it’s not as useful in the way that I had always hoped. I mean, I’ve been at this for years now and am nowhere near able to hold casual conversations when meeting new people.
I can manage targeted conversations: “Hello, I’d like to order the x, y, z, please.” or “I’d like two tickets please, one adult and one student.” or “Excuse me, is this seat free?” or even, “We need a car park, can you help me?” … but when it comes to chatting about the weather, what someone does for work, or even interacting with sales people to buy a new winter jacket in the right size, and ‘oh, is this on sale?’ Not so much.
And every time I try to start a conversation with someone in German, they can immediately tell I’m not a native speaker and will either respond with “English?”, or just reply in English because I assume it’s quicker for them as their English is way better than my German! So practice is hard to come by, even in those everyday transactional sorts of conversations. More and more I’m finding that people speak English wherever we go now, so having local language skills aren’t as necessary as they were 30 years ago.
I’m hoping English isn’t taking over the world… I mean, if one language has to, I’m glad it’s the one super weird one that I’m completely fluent in! But I think the rapacity with which English is become so globally pervasive is a symptom of the Internet Age. So surely that can’t end anywhere good!
EDITED TO ADD: Local language skills still very much needed!
We got to talking with the man in front of us at the Rammstein concert – he was named Sasha and seemed super excited to meet some Australians who had come all the way to Austria for the concert… said we ‘win the people who travel the most far!’ He was so excited he added BigSal on Facebook and wanted to tag himself in a photo with her… which she obliging did.
Only then she looked up her new ‘friend’ and found she was his new ‘comrade’ in a post that said:
So, yeah… a little bit of Googling later and it seems our conversational skill were good enough for us to accidentally make friends with some full on Nazi white supremacist wanker, and then everything he said to us after that I enthusiastically translated for Sal as : “Ja! I fucked a horse in Berlin!”, because we obviously had no idea what he was saying to us at all!