Kristie Kachler

* Kristie Kachler *
I’ve been learning German off and on for almost two years now, and sometimes the language seems to have batted its pretty eyes at me and turned away. Like any doomed pairing worth its salt, we share an irreconcilable incompatibility: I’m precise when precision is important, but at a point I leave stray details alone so that I can read and sleep and stuff. Unfortunately, German requires its learners to be always on duty with an unerring, unflagging attention to detail. The grammar is so involved that I’ve started to suspect you have to practice it from birth to have any hope of mastering it[1]. Strictures of word order plague beginners whose verbs are always burning off like fog before the end of a relative clause, while the chicaneries of declinations ensure that it’s almost impossible for even an advanced learner to string together, say, three perfectly accurate sentences. There’s probably a German proverb that speaks to the shame of overcomplicating a thing that could be simple, but no one has taught it to me yet. All the native speakers I know are too busy hin-ning and her-ring, heraus-ing and hinauf-ing away. To listen in on this is to entertain visions of the nimblest governess running to and fro in an Alpine wonderland, and then to admit that The Sound of Music made too deep an impression, and then to suspect an impending seizure if you have to listen much longer.