The Sounds of German

Being constantly surrounded by a language is always an interesting oral experience, especially when it's a language that you don't know very well. With German, however, I've found that being surrounded by this language isn't exactly the most pleasant experience. I've never found it to be a particularly beautiful language—in fact, I think it's pretty ugly. Even when I speak it. There are some sounds that I find okay, and it certainly isn't as ugly as I thought it was before I started studying it, but it isn't singsongy like Italian and doesn't flow continuously like French. I guess it's even uglier than English, and I'm not particularly attached to English as an aesthetically pleasing language.

In any case, I thought that for this post, it might be nice to reflect on a few of the sounds I hear a lot in German, and what I think of them, for those of you readers who don't really know what it sounds like.

First off, the umlauts, otherwise known as the ¨ accent. There are three vowels that can have an umlaut above them in German (ü, ö, ä). If you can't type them with your computer, you can also just write each letter with an e following it, which is—at least for me—a more phonetically meaningful way of writing it. The umlaut changes the vowels by making them less "pure" in a way, kind of like how you'd think they'd be pronounced if they were followed by an E. The actual vowels (u, o, a) are pronounced like this: (ooo, oh, ah). With the umlauts, they are pronounced a bit differently: [y] is the phonetic way of writing ü (which is also the French u)...essentially it is an "ee" but with your lips rounded, as if you were saying "ou"; ö is pronounced like the French e, or [ø] with the proper phonetic writing...kind of like pronouncing "eh" but with your lips rounded; and the ä is like "eh" or the "ea" in "bear."

Got it?

Then there are the "ch" that crop up everywhere. Now, don't be fooled like I was initially. I thought that every "ch" in German was that guttural "ch" like in Hebrew. Turns out that that clearing out your throat sound only happens about half of the time. For instance, if I want to say the word "I", I say "ich." As in the famous "Ich bin ein Berliner." Now, this "ch" in "ich" isn't a "sh" or a "ch", but rather a bit of air flowing over your tongue as you raise it up to the roof of your mouth. It kind of sounds like a cat hissing, I guess. But it's less harsh than you'd think. But, if the "ch" comes after an "o" or a "u" or "a," then it is pronounced with the throat. 

The German "r" in the middle of a word is like a French "r," (kind of gargling a bit), but at the end of a word, it's basically just implied. So "Berliner" isn't pronounced like in English, but rather "Berlineh." Like a Boston "r." There is also the ß in German, which is like a double S. "tion" at the end of a word is like a "zion" where the z is a "tz" (always is in German). 

Well there you have it, the sounds of German! That's what I'm hearing every day, when people are speaking or when I'm just trying to sound out certain words in my head. That's what I heard last night when I saw Cabaret (das Musical) performed live, translated into German. The lousy German accents that the American actors generally fake were translated into the real language, and it was a pretty special experience, let me tell you. 

The thing I found most difficult about Cabaret in German (and I'll write more about this on my other blog, the Broadway one) was how sinister it seemed in the authentic language. In fact, I think that is part of my problem with German. While stories of the Holocaust and WWII are certainly upsetting to everyone (not least of all the German people themselves), it was only when speaking of those subjects that I was ever exposed to German. In high school, when learning about WWII, we heard Hitler's speeches, Nazi guards screaming "Raus" at Jewish victims, and propaganda videos. I never heard "nice" German, or a person speaking German calmly without screaming at someone. In a way, that has shaped my perception of the language, and it's not always pleasant to hear it. Hopefully by dint of improving my German, I can surmount this reaction I have to the language itself, and learn to find the beauty in these sounds.  

A weekend in Vilnius

Hello everyone!

So, let me begin this post by saying this: I am not very well traveled. Sure, I fool people since I've been to plenty of cities in France and Italy, since I speak those languages and have really been able to learn a substantial amount about those cultures. But, when you think of all there is to see, I've barely even scratched the surface! And my recent trip to the capital of Lithuania, the delightfully beautiful Vilnius, reminded me of just how much more there is out there and how little I actually know. Let me share some of the (probably obvious) things I learned about/in Lithuania:

1) Lithuania is not on the Euro, but is in the Schengen Zone. That means that you can travel freely between Lithuania and other European countries in the Schengen Zone, but you need to exchange your currency. I didn't know that was possible...

2) Lithuania will soon be on the Euro. I am one of the last tourists to get Lithuanian Litas! So for that, I saved 10 of them (a little under $5).

3) Lithuania is in another time zone. It is one hour later than it is here in Berlin. This did not, however, stop the Lithuanian airline (Air Lituanica) from messing up the ETA and saying we were getting in at midnight when we were actually getting in at 1:00am (midnight Berlin time). I got on the flight and they said it would be 2 hours, and my thought was: then how are we getting in at midnight? Turns out, I was right and they were wrong.

4) I cannot understand a single word of Lithuanian. It doesn't resemble any language I know, and sounds totally distinctive. I really enjoyed listening to it, but more than that, I loved being surrounded by a culture I knew nothing about!

5) There are still people there who grow up speaking Yiddish, a language I thought was long dead.

6) Lithuania is so far north, that it gets dark extremely late in the summer, and the sun rises very early. My friend's Yiddish program had a Shabbat dinner which they began before the sunset (whereas generally in Judaism, you begin Shabbat—as you would any day of the week—at sundown). In fact, when we finished the dinner, it was still fairly light outside.

7) Vilnius is one of the only European capitals that it is possible to visit by hot air balloon. Unfortunately for me, it was just too expensive and also a bit inconvenient. Apparently to fly in an untethered hot air balloon, one must either wake up incredibly early or go in the early evening. I will say this, though: it was really beautiful eating a delicious dinner and watching the hot air balloons pass over us.

8) I can understand almost all the Yiddish I hear—apparently it is really just dumbed down German. I knew that the language was created in ghettos, a way of writing German phonetically with the Hebrew alphabet so that no one could read messages, but I had also assumed that it had become a more or less distinct language in its own right. In any case, how convenient for me!

Finally, here are some pictures. The city was beautiful and I particularly enjoyed spending my weekend there. While I may never have an excuse to return, it was definitely a good decision to go!

My German Level

During my first week in Berlin, I noticed I was making a rookie mistake. I had assumed that merely being in Germany would help my German improve, but still making almost no effort to practice. For instance, I am living with a German person, yet we speak English all the time! I went to a language conversation group and spoke some German, yes, but also some French and Italian. And while I do acknowledge that at giant gatherings of international travelers (like the ones I've been attending, the loveliest of which is a huge picnic near the banks of the river!), the default language is English, I should really be making an effort to speak more German. 

So, I decided to rectify the situation two days ago and found a not-so-expensive intensive German course. Signing up for it was already forcing myself to practice—there were two online tests before I could even think of going to the building and signing up. The first test I passed with flying colors (almost every one right)! The second one was almost impossible—it was a fill-in-the-blank format with no word bank at all. I'm not sure how they expect anyone to know exactly which words they intended for each blank! But, I still got above 50%. After submitting the online tests, I got an email (entirely in German) telling me to come in for even more examinations. Fun times, seriously! I had a 30-minute oral exam with a very nice woman who, in the end, informed me that, by EU standards, I should be in a B2-level course. What is B2 you ask? Well, let me tell you: 

"You can communicate spontaneously and fluently - even in longer conversations with native speakers. You can follow complicated texts and discussions and express your opinion on abstract topics."

Well, that's that! I don't know why I even want to take a course! Just kidding—there's always room for improvement. So, long story short—I have signed up for a German course, which I hope will resolve my laziness issues. I've also started reading German children's books that Eileen has lying around the house. My first one, Oma Paloma, is a lovely tale about a little girl's very unusual grandmother from South America. International, adorable, and most importantly, at my level (plenty of cute pictures too!)!

Off to Lithuania for the weekend! As they'd say here in Berlin: Tschüss! 

Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion through the Astonishing World of Math

Hello all! So, I said this blog was going to be about work and pleasure, which—luckily for me—are basically the same thing. This post will therefore be closer to the work side, in which I will describe a book I just finished. A review of sorts, if you wish, though my intention isn't to pass judgment on quality, but rather explain what I have learned from this book with respect to what I study.

I read the majority of this lovely little book by Alex Bellos on planes, in the U-Bahn (the Berlin subway), at the pool yesterday, and overall in transit. Thankfully, for a book about mathematics, the title was aptly chosen—it was an "excursion" and not a textbook. The book reads like narrative, and therefore not like mathematics (which should ideally be read with a pencil and paper). The author takes you by the hand and provides a survey course on what makes math interesting, why knowing it is important, and what mathematics tells us about ourselves. All in all, I would highly recommend it for anyone—whether they be a lover or hater of the subject.

Why did I read this book? Well, there were a few reasons. First off, I'm always curious to hear how popular authors make math accessible to a general reading public. While my dissertation isn't exactly intended for a general public, those who read my work are often mathematically ignorant given that there is a huge divide between the sciences and humanities in academia today. One of the biggest challenges I will face in writing my dissertation will be to make the mathematics in the OuLiPo accessible as well as entertaining, so reading books such as this one helps me get a sense of how to accomplish this rhetorically speaking.

Second, Alex Bellos is my advisor's son, and he has mentioned this book (and its sequel, The Grapes of Math) several times. One of the strangest aspects of reading Here's Looking at Euclid was the sense of déjà vu. I've heard many of the stories related in this book before, from my advisor, who has a similar way of explaining difficult concepts, telling stories, and dealing with serious material in a nonthreatening manner.

Additionally, the sheer volume of knowledge this book deals with so effortlessly reminded me of the importance of breadth. While there is always a tendency to write about something so specific that no one knows anything about it, or rather to facilitate the research and assure yourself that you haven't missed anything, there is a real charm to works that cover large periods, jump from one century to another, and string together seemingly separate cultures and studies into one larger narrative. The OuLiPo, I believe, is the sort of topic for which one should do just that.

In any case, I don't want to spoil the book, but let me tell you a few of the topics so that you all know how exciting it would be to read!

1) I found the story about the tribe that only has the words to denote the first five numbers fascinating—specifically for how it digresses into a discussion of a logarithmic way of understanding mathematics.

2) The discussion of gambling was so fascinating that yesterday at the food, I started discussing it with Eileen's high school friend Mac (who is a professional skateboarder). I was telling him specifically about the gambler's paradox (how a gambler might think that playing at one machine rather than another will pay out more, because that machine is hot or something) and an activity the author described in which one person flips a coin a certain number of times and writes out the order of heads and tails while another person writes out what they think that number of random coin flips might be. If one carries this out, it is always easy to tell which one was written by a human and which was the actual coin flip. Mac was so interested, he insisted that we try it ourselves, and even though I had already explained the phenomenon to him, our results still supported Bellos' book. As Bellos writes: "Because our brains are bad at understanding randomness, probability is the branch of math most riddled with paradoxes and surprises. We instinctively attribute patterns to situations, even when we know there are none." (224)

3) The pages about the normal bell curve which ended with a musing on how difficult counting and measuring actually is was mind boggling!

4) The history of numbers, explaining how abstraction originally occurred and how that sort of thought has infiltrated our language of numbers.

5) The chapter on recreational mathematics and mathematical games was delightful! And I learned a lot about the history of Sudoku.

6) The history of Pi—a must read for anyone who has ever been curious!

7) General musings on language and mathematics, which I think will be useful for me as I continue. Mathematics invents a language with which you can manipulate abstractions. With the proper language, it doesn't matter if you even understand the abstraction fully, you can still work out problems and make the language accomplish things. Then, results seem as though they were intrinsic in the language, whereas the language is really a construct and the abstraction itself is what behaves that way.

In any case, I would recommend it. Fascinating read for anyone, and written in such a way that it is enjoyable, quick, and easy. You don't even realize how much you are learning.

Recycling in Berlin

I know I promised a post on the books I'm currently about to finish, but a cultural lesson just arose and I really want to write about that first. The past few days, my friend Eileen (I'll do a background on her in a second) came home from work and reprimanded me for putting a Kinder chocolate wrapper in the paper recycling. It's not paper, she told me. Can't you tell how shiny it is? It belongs not in the trash, not in the paper recycling, certainly not in the glass recycling, but in this box here. She advised me to google "how to recycle in Germany." I thought she was kidding, but then I found this: http://www.howtogermany.com/pages/recycling.html

Now, I won't go into all the details. You can read the article yourselves (and I strongly encourage you all to do so). Indeed, I found it hilarious!! I've been to Berlin twice now, but only as a tourist. The first time I stayed with Eileen was two summers ago after my time in Avignon, and I thought that the fact that she had four or five different boxes to throw out her garbage/recycling was just an individual quirk. I had no idea that it was a country-wide movement to reduce garbage. But wow, does their system seem to work wonders! You can see on the website that Germany produces about 30 million tons of garbage annually, which seems like a lot. But, with a population of 82 million people, that's actually very little garbage per person. You can see it on this site: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Environment/Municipal-waste-generation

US: 760kgs of garbage per person per year
Germany: 540kgs per person per year.

So, quite a significant difference. There are a lot of rules. My favorite was that you shouldn't be sorting garbage after 6pm to avoid annoying your neighbors. There is a proper time for that!

In other news, like any good international traveler, I have been meeting other good international travelers! I found a language table on Tuesday night, where I met people who speak more languages than I could probably ever hope to in my lifetime. It's one of the many reasons I love being in Europe: in America, speaking 4 languages (well, 3 and a half...my German's still getting there) is extremely impressive, but here in Europe, it's just average. I met a guy at this language exchange who was raised bilingual with French and Spanish, also speaks English, German, and Italian amazingly well (I verified), his Arabic and Hebrew sounded good to me (I honestly can't tell), and he apparently also speaks ancient Latin and Greek (yes, speaks! He said that's the only way to learn them for real). I'm sure he spoke others (he mentioned Swedish at least once), but those were the ones I heard that night. The funniest part is that he is a student at the ENS (where I will be starting September), so I already have a friend there now! Talk about a crazy coincidence! I also met an Italian guy and a French girl, and we'll all be going to swim in some lake near Berlin on Sunday. International gatherings are always so interesting!

Okay, the next post will absolutely 100% be about a book. Unless I choose to write about Berlin's World Cup victory instead. I sure picked the right country to visit this summer! Tschüss!

Arrival in Berlin

While my family might think I have gypsy feet, that certainly doesn't mean I like to travel. I like being in new places, learning new languages, seeing new cultures, and being out of my comfort zone. But I don't like getting to those places, not with how much of a hassle traveling has become. Aside from the visa issues, the plane tickets cost a fortune, and the slightest mishap can trip you up more than anything. Perhaps that's why the past few summers, I've opted for group trips—it's nice to know that, should something go wrong, someone will be there to help you. But, throughout all that traveling, I realized that my favorite parts of those group trips were when I left the group and wandered around on my own. Hence my decision to do Europe alone this time.

Now, this means that my travel plans were entirely on my shoulders. Since Princeton would pay for my flight to/from Paris for the year, I had to have a layover at Charles de Gaulle, one of my least favorite airports of all time. My flight from Toronto was getting in at 7am and the only reasonably priced flight to Berlin around that time was one at 9:20 with Lufthansa. First off, this was a legal connection (over 90 minutes), but I doubted it from the beginning. You see, planes that land at De Gaulle don't pull right up to the gate. Instead you get off the plane and into a bus to take you to the actual airport, which takes more time than at other airports. Next, I knew I would have to go through passport control and customs, which included picking up my bags rather than having them sent automatically to the next flight. That, too, was going to take more time. Then, once I was through all that, I would have to take the CDGVAL (the shuttle between terminals, kind of like Newark Airport's AirTran system, so if you've ever been to Newark, you have some idea of what I was dealing with) to a different terminal. That requires a ten minute walk, then waiting for the shuttle, then however long the shuttle takes. After that, I would finally be able to check in for my flight, check my bags, and go through security (which at any normal airport would take a good hour, but who really knows at CDG?). All of this jetlagged, exhausted, and hungry. As you can see, just because I was paranoid about missing my connection doesn't mean the entire airport system wasn't out to get me!

The issue happened at my baggage check-in with Lufthansa. They had so many flights taking off at the same time that the line for the bags literally was not moving. As hundreds of people waited (complaining, because after all, we were in France!), the Lufthansa crew would walk by calling for the most urgent flights. The last one they called for was taking off at 9:15, and I asked: "But my flight leaves at 9:20! Isn't that just as urgent?" But apparently it wasn't. So I continued to wait, internally freaking out about the fact that what Canada considers an appropriate size for a carry-on bag was apparently much larger than what Lufthansa allowed. I was only allowed one checked bag.

Finally, I reached the bag checkers, exactly 30 minutes before the flight, which they were allowing that day only because they were so disorganized. I explained my problem to the woman, who was very nice and agreed to check both bags and let me pay afterwards, since otherwise, the bags wouldn't make it on the flight. The problem was: the German woman behind her. She said my first bag was 1kg overweight (which it wasn't in Toronto), and that I would have to pay 65 euros for that, as well as 65 for the additional bag. I didn't feel like arguing, since that would waste time, so I ran to the second desk to pay. The woman there, after hearing my explanation, said (in French): "Are you aware that your flight takes off in 20 minutes?" I continued to explain that the bags were already checked and that the reason I was so late was through no fault of my own and rather that their lines were way too long and that they were disorganized. She took her sweet time charging me 130 euros and then told me to run. In the end, I arrived at the gate, sweaty, starving, and exhausted. It was a lovely flight.

Thankfully, I'm not really doing Europe alone. My friend Eileen met me at the airport in Berlin. She's a Berlin native, but also American. At that point, I'm not sure I would have been linguistically capable of reading all the German and finding my way to her apartment. Luckily, she had already gotten me a ticket and knew exactly which buses to take.

Needless to say, I don't think I want to get on an airplane for a while. I'm going to stick to Berlin (with the slight exception of a weekend in Lithuania) and ground transportation. I might even take a train to Paris, given how annoying these airports are. Anyway, I'm back to working. Plenty of books to read, museums to visit, and dissertation ideas to formulate. Speaking of which, I've been reading two very interesting books about mathematics. Look out for a new blogpost about them soon!

Visa obtained...kind of?

Since my last post, I have successfully completed the visa process, but not without its drama. Two trips to the NYC Consulate visa section were stressful, annoying, and the visa they gave me might very well cost me more money. Apparently, I can enter the Schengen Region (a group of European countries that has eliminated passport control for travel between their borders, France and Germany included) on my 90-day tourist visa (what it is called when you just go without a visa on an American passport, or other Schengen-approved passport). But, I need to reenter the Schengen zone on the date my visa begins (and for that, need to exit it for at least 24 hours). So, to translate all of this administrative, bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, this essentially means that the French are forcing me to take a vacation to London for 24 hours, no matter what that will cost. Either that, or somewhere else outside of the Schengen Zone.

In any case, after obtaining the visa, my mother and I drove an extra-long ride back to Buffalo. We got a flat tire somewhere around Scranton, PA and it took hours to get an appropriate replacement. It turns out that this was quite the expensive trip for everyone, but at least it's over now.

Me in the trunk after unloading all of my stuff the fourth time we thought we had finally found a replacement tire...

I leave for Berlin on July 10th, and should arrive (after a short layover at CDG-Roissy) the morning of the 11th. My friend Eileen will pick me up at the airport and take me to her apartment (after I give her a gift of Nerds, the candy—apparently that's all she wants!). From then on, who knows? All I have planned so far is a weekend trip to Vilnius, Lithuania to visit my friend Charlotte who will be studying Yiddish there, then tentative trips to Italy and now London. We'll see if this is all worth it!