Getting Over Good Advice

This might be my favourite photo so far. The Hund was a spaniel, very low to the ground, and my preferred translation of the sign is: "If you rob us, the spaniel will watch you intently." This might deter a self-conscious thief. 

When I was here the first time, I got a piece of good/bad advice from the teacher leading the group: "You all have no feel for the language." This was directed at a group of people with varying exposures to German: they'd been exchange students, they'd lived in German-speaking countries, they'd taken classes, including her classes. The point was not at all stupid. When faced with a communications challenge, things occur to you to say. In English, it's ok just to say what occurs to you because its basis is a whole life of hearing English. In Germany, those intuitions have no such basis. One needs to look up the idiom or learn the idiom. There's no short-cut in one's intuitions. 

This is like the advice given to people who have been singing casually when they get serious about singing: you need to relearn how to sing, if you are to do it really well. Otherwise, your bad habits set a limit to how good you can get.

Coming back, I have fallen into a situation in which this advice just does not apply. After almost 40 years of not speaking the language, I simply have to compose complex notes and I don't have time to check every idiom. So, if I am to work at all, I have to rely on what occurs to me. And so the way that this advice is false also shows up. English is in the family of languages in which German also lives, and so one can sometimes be understood in a very annoying way with just English. As one gains information about grammar, vocabulary and so on, it becomes likelier that one will be understood if one just says what it occurs to one to say. One is, however, often clumsy and annoying. 

There is a way of proceeding that consists in finding out how to do things right, and there is a way of proceeding that consists in doing them somewhat wrong but well enough: in the case of language, well enough to be understandable but annoying. The problem for the second approach: to gradually get less annoying. The point about bad habits, across a broad range of activities, is a good point. The point about not taking forever to do what one needs to do is also a good point.

I think these two approaches are quite general educational approaches, across a range of disciplines. People freeze when they have to do what they don't know how to do even when they know something about how to do it. The problem of a teacher is generally not addressing the situation of the totally ignorant but rather addressing the situation of the person with promising but unreliable intuitions. 

My solution thus far to the problem of getting better is Harry Potter in German. I had never read it in English, and find myself compelled to rip through it. I don't know whether the idioms stay with me: ask me when I meet my first troll. 

(Afterword: what I actually find, since this is my book-to-take-along, is that all sorts of situations show Hogwartesque dimensions, especially, the university departments.)