allegedly salubrious

Burger’s second novel, Die künstliche Mutter, is significantly more autobiographical than one might suppose, given its fantastic setting. In this glum but sardonic account of a specialist in German Literature and Glaciology, Burger took up the theme of his own psychosomatic affliction, his “genital migraines,” as the protagonist terms them. The book takes place in an otherworldly institution where patients, lying on beds in tunnels carved in a massif, absorbing the heat and moisture, are subjected to a battery of bizarre therapeutic measures. To devise his hero’s elaborate medical history, Burger devoured reams of psychiatric literature and even took a cure himself near Bad Gastein, in Austria, where guests rest in underground caves to enjoy the allegedly salubrious effects of the area’s high radon concentration.

Uwe Schütte (translated by Adrian Nathan West) on Hermann Burger.  This sounds amazing, I thought, and would have wondered why I had never heard of Burger if Schütte had not helpfully explained:

Hermann Burger (Menziken, 1942) is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview. Yet it is not surprising that he fell into obscurity after his death, from an overdose of barbiturates at age forty-six. He shares this fate with many of the most august names from the peripheries of German-language literature who, never managing to escape from the ghetto of Austrian or Swiss publishing, either gave up in exhaustion, or went on writing and were forgotten nonetheless.

I have not yet renewed my membership of the Staatsbibliothek, but perhaps the Gedenkbibliothek will have Burger even if he is only on the periphery of German-language literature.

The whole thing at Asymptote, here.   (HT @timesflow RTing @a_nathanwest)

over there

Came across a fabulous blog, Humor Vagabundo, written by Luis Moreno Villamediana, a Venezuelan poet; here's part of his description of writing a journal in German for a class:

Nunca escribí en mi apartamento una sola línea de ese cuaderno. Lo extranjero no es un acto privado. Cada encierro consiste en una pila de gestos cuya repetición confundimos con la definición de pertenencia; únicamente afuera nos damos cuenta de los cambios de nacionalidad o de costumbres. Prefería caminar como veinte minutos a una cafetería y aplicarme a escribir con todos los ruidos de un lugar compartido. Las máquinas de espresso y su ecosistema tienen sonidos propios. En la preparación, el operador debe deshacerse de la borra con golpes secos en el pipote de basura; de inmediato debe pulsar algo parecido a un gatillo y volver a llenar, con café nuevo, el recipiente de metal; a eso se añade el siseo del vapor: todo un sistema de códigos fácilmente legibles. Allí escuchaba, además, retazos de inglés, cachos de charlas que no me importaban y acababan en polvo. Sobre esa superficie enredada pretendía sustentarse el idioma alemán.

No me afectaba usar una lengua extranjera para aprender otra. Usaba una gramática escrita en inglés y un diccionario inglés-alemán; de esa manera acentuaba la natural extrañeza de esa instrucción, y con ella mi concepto de idioma nativo. Era un exilio doble, sin heridas ni arrepentimientos. Eso no me hizo más fácil la escritura, como puede entenderse. Para llenar un par de páginas cortas me tardaba al menos dos horas. Era una empresa flaubertiana en busca del mot juste. Necesitaba confirmar cada palabra, cerciorarme de la corrección sintáctica, asegurarme de mostrar cierto humor, ser, incluso, coherente. Me gustaba entretener a Frau Angelika con historias ligeramente absurdas; según sus comentarios, la cosa cumplía con su objetivo.

The rest here.

the trouble with informants

My friend Ingrid is in Berlin. We were going to go to Badeschiff, a swimming pool-cum-sauna floating in the Spree, but she had to see her doctor and it was too much. So we met at Kleisther, a café down the street from my new apartment which has a Hotspot.

I had a grammatical question. Words like 'Wohnung' and 'Nutzung' are, of course, feminine, so the genitive looks just like the nominative. But if they're put in a compound an s is added: 'Nutzungsdauer'. What's going on? Other things being equal, I would have thought the compound required the genitive form (cf Altertumswissenschaft), but this isn't actually the genitive, so wha-?

Informant: Hm. I don't know.

We discussed an exhibition Ingrid had seen on political minimalism. I had another grammatical question (it's hell being an informant).

Why do you say KotbussER Tor but SchlesischES Tor? Tor is neuter, so Schlesisches Tor makes sense, but why is it Kotbusser Tor?

The informant mulls this over. She says: Well, Kotbuss is a town, Potsdam is a town (Potsdamerplatz), if you were putting Köln in a compound you'd say Kölnerstraße. Dusseldorferstraße. But it's Kleistpark and Alexanderplatz without an ending because they're people, Schlesisches Tor, well, schlesen is a verb.

This reminds me strangely of an episode in Winnie the Pooh.

Christopher Robin explains that the name of his bear is Winnie the Pooh.
Narrator: But I thought Winnie was a girl's name?
Christopher Robin: But it's Winnie THER Pooh.
Narrator: Ah. NOW I see.

(Note to American readers: THER: Brit for Thuh. The r is silent. Similarly, when the girls in Little Women call their mother Marmee, the pronunciation is, mirabile dictu, Mommy. The little women have a Boston accent. We thought you should be told.)

I say: OK, well, what about the sechsigER Jahre? (i.e. the 60s) Why is it 'er'?

Informant: Well, if you were talking about 60 years you'd say sechsig Jahre, but here you're talking about something in the past.

I say: So you wouldn't refer to the 60s of the 21st century that way? You wouldn't say 'In den sechsiger Jahren des 21. Jahrhunderts'?

Informant: It would sound funny. Maybe because we're used to using it of the past. You might say that, but it would sound funny.

I'm disheartened, demoralised. I completely forget to ask my informant whether she shares my instincts re the Australopithecus effect.

definite descriptions and such

I was having another look at Gerhard Antretter's Deutsch zu Zweit, and decided to see what he had to say about articles. The index gave only a single page for the subject, so I feared the worst.

Antretter:

Der Artikel

Was die Artikel ein und der betrifft, so stellt für bestimmte Lerner nicht deren Deklination das Hauptproblem dar, sondern die Tatsache, dass es sie überhaupt gibt. Neben sehr vielen anderen Sprachen kommt beispielsweise das Russische ohne solche Wörter aus und erfahrungsgemäß ist es das größte Einzelproblem russischer Lerner, sich auf die Notwendigkeit ihrer Verwendung im Deutschen zu besinnen. ... Wenn Ihr Partner zu diesen schwierigen Fällen zählt, suchen Sie sich gute Übungen zum Thema und legen Sie große Beharrlichkeit an den Tag. Wir gehen wegen der großen Komplexität der Materie und des im Verhältnis dazu doch nicht so großen Gewichts der Fehler nicht näher darauf ein. (!!!!!!!!!)

That is [rough and ready translation],

As far as the articles ein and der are concerned, it's not their declension that presents the main problem for certain learners, but the fact that they exist at all. Among many other languages Russian, for example, has no such words, and experience has shown that the single greatest problem[!!!!!!!] for Russian learners is remembering the need to use them in German. If your partner is one of these difficult cases, look for some good exercises on the subject [!] and show great perseverance [!!!!!!!]. Because of the great complexity of the material [?!] and the relative unimportance of the mistakes [hm], we shall not deal with this in greater detail. [punctuation fails me]

Now the thing is. The point of Deutsch zur Zweite was to provide a book that couples could use as a resource when one was German, the other not, so that the non-German could improve by practising with someone who was (probably) not a trained language teacher. A very large proportion of foreigners in Germany come, as it happens, from Eastern Europe; another substantial number come from Turkey; both groups have a first language in which articles are not used. And Antretter's right - for someone who is used to surviving quite happily without any articles at all, working out where to deploy them in a language which uses them with gay abandon is probably the single greatest problem they will encounter. So, um, wha-?

If your native language uses articles, TEACHING someone how to use them is probably one of the trickiest things you can tackle. It's not easy for professional language teachers; for an amateur it's unbelievably hard. So hard, in fact, that it's precisely the sort of topic the amateur might hope to find covered in, um, a book about teaching your partner to learn German. (Telling the reader 'Well, this is incredibly complicated and we can't be bothered so we'll just leave you to your own devices' is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.)

Is it really the case, anyway, that these mistakes don't matter much? In English, in popular imagination, the linguistic development of mankind matches that of the English speaker. Once, in the dawn of time, hominids roamed the earth, using primitive implements of flint. They had primitive terms with which to identify objects in their environment, yes: stone, knife, woolly mammoth. But not only did they have no notion of modern dentistry and supersonic flight, they also lacked the technology for definite and indefinite descriptions. The definite and indefinite article are the products of thousands and thousands and thousands of years of linguistic evolution... And in our infancy we retrace the linguistic development of the race. We too start with simple nouns and adjectives, the odd verb, and work our way up to articles, adverbs, tenses and other jollities. The non-native speaker who dispenses with articles sounds like someone at the stage of linguistic development of (at a guess) a two-year-old. Or Australopithecus.

Adam Smith, I think, said the basic requirements for human life include what is necessary to participate in society without shame. If you live in a society where all men wear hats, a man who does not have a hat lacks a necessity - he cannot appear in public without shame. Similarly, if failure to use articles slashes your apparent intellectual age to that of a toddler, the use of articles is a necessity; a book for couples confronting an article-heavy language ought to tackle them.

(It may be, of course, that the omission of articles in German does not have the Australopithecus effect. I've noticed, though, that Germans have a pronounced antipathy to teaching their system of articles to outsiders - it's always either jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, something either so simple you should have covered it in a beginners' course or so complicated it must be gone into at great length some other time.)

DzZ does have a good section on separable verbs, also normally jam yesterday/tomorrow.

I am a doughnut, oder?

There's a post on the NY Times book blog, Paper Cuts, about Kennedy's famous speech and alleged howler, including a YouTube clip of Kennedy giving the speech. Steve Coates talks to Michael Jennings, Professor of German at Princeton, asking whether 'Ich bin ein Berliner' really does mean 'I am a doughnut.' (Jennings argues that it could in fact be a more nuanced way of stating one's affiliation with Berlin - 'Ich bin Berliner' meaning 'I'm a native of Berlin,' 'Ich bin ein Berliner' indicating more recent arrival.) Somewhat oddly, Coates keeps asking whether it's ungrammatical. I think even those who think it means 'I am a doughnut' have never claimed it was ungrammatical; 'I'd love to be an Oscar Meyer Wiener' is perfectly grammatical, but it would be an odd thing to say to underline, as it might be, solidarity with the US against al-Qaedah.
Whatever the sentence may be able to mean, anyway, it is as an assertion of doughnuthood that it is remembered, loved and recycled by local advertising agencies, a source of comfort to the linguistically-challenged Berlinerin.

we want umlauts

Bewteen games ish hab gefragt: "Woher kommst du eigentlich?"
"Ish? Ish bin Türker. Komm' aus Istanbul. Dub bis Amerikaner?"
"Ursprunglish, ja- Kalifornien.- aber ish hab schon lange Zeit in Deutschland gelebt."
"akso, und was machst du hier? Erasmus?"
"nee- bin kein student mehr- also, beruflich bin ish journalist-"
"aksooo, journalismus- große zeitung- ? New York Times??"
"nööööö, das wäre sau toll, aber nee- nix so wie New York TImes"

the one and only TARARTRAT, the rest here

plots

Kevin Connolly has very kindly sent me a new improved plot of the gender mnemonics data using Excel 2007


which really is awfully nice.

Winnie der Pooh

I went to a 2-hour Artikelkurs at Hartnackschule toward the end of April. As it turned out, the course was not really about articles at all, it was about grammatical gender: it offered an introduction to mnemonic techniques that would help one remember whether a noun was masculine, feminine or neuter. The technique was essentially that of the art of memory as practised in antiquity, one I've heard of but never bothered to try: one assigns an image to the thing to be remembered. So one might assign the image of water to 'das' and then, to remember the gender of a neuter noun, assign a mental image to the noun and associate this with water. One assigns the image of a woman to 'die' and then, to remember a feminine nouns, assigns it a mental image and associates this with a woman. In one's mind, then, one might have a sofa, a book, a knife, floating in a pool. And so on.

At the beginning of the class the teacher did an experiment to see how well students memorised things using the techniques they already had. Students were given a list of 20 words, each of which had been assigned one of three articles invented for the occasion (fif, led, had). They were given three minutes to memorise the articles; asked to chat among themselves for two minutes; then given a test on the articles.

The number of correct replies reported was:

2 6 6 7 8 8 9 9 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 17 18 19

(I got 15.) The teacher asked those who got 15 or better what they did. One girl said she memorised the nouns for 2 articles, because everything else would take the third. (This was esentially what I did: write down two lists and memorise those.) Another (who got 19) said she constructed a story using images from one group of nouns, another story for another.

The teacher spent the rest of the class explaining how the visualisation technique worked. At the end he gave another test, again with 20 nouns and 3 invented articles, asking us to try the visualisation technique. I got 20. The results for the class were

(pairing results with original results):
18 20 20 20 20 18 20 19 19 18 17 20 20 19 20 20 19 19

or (in ascending order)

17 18 18 18 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

We can summarise by saying that on the first text only 3 people got a score of 17 or higher, while on the second test no one got a score below 17; on the first test no one got 20 right, while on the second 9 (almost 50%) did. But it's easier to see the dramatic shift in the distribution of scores with a couple of graphs:




(Yes, yes, the information definitely could be better presented, but there is work to be done.)

Now, we can't be sure the improvement was entirely due to use of the visualisation technique. I used a combination of visualisation and the two-lists trick (i.e. bothered to visualise only two sets). Since another member of the class had mentioned this trick, it's quite possible that others in the class were also combining the two. Still, it's pretty impressive. The only problem is, the technique is of limited use in mastering the art of German articles.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it's fairly straightforward to correlate a mental image with the article 'der' and then associate this images for appropriate nouns. It's not at all straightforward to come up with a system of mental images such that 'der' is associated with masculine singular nouns in the nominative, feminine singular nouns in the genitive and dative, and plural nouns in the genitive. It's by no means obvious how to organise one's mental images so that 'den' is associated with masculine singular nouns in the accusative and plural nouns in the dative.

Now, recycling is a very good thing when one is dealing with scarce resources. It's not obvious that articles, whether definite or indefinite, fall in that category. Instead of cunningly reusing 'der' (so that it turns up not in one case but three), why not use it exclusively for the nominative masculine singular? And have a unique form for the genitive feminine singular? And another for the dative feminine singular? Go on, you want to say, be a devil!

The problem is, natural languages are not like programming languages. There's no one issuing a beta release and then fixing all the things that interfere with performance (for instance, by slowing down processing, taking up too much memory to store...). We can't fix the languages, so we have to fix the learners.

The interesting thing about the class was that it showed the (to a foreigner) peculiar German reluctance to help those grappling with the system of articles. It's not peculiar that the man in the street has better things to do with his time, of course, but schools are unanimous in shying away from the dreary task. This school was unusual only in ducking the issue in a course specifically advertised as addressing it.

[reposted because Blogger put it in the wrong place chronologically. ]

Winnie der Pooh

I went to a 2-hour Artikelkurs at Hartnackschule toward the end of April. As it turned out, the course was not really about articles at all, it was about grammatical gender: it offered an introduction to mnemonic techniques that would help one remember whether a noun was masculine, feminine or neuter. The technique was essentially that of the art of memory as practised in antiquity, one I've heard of but never bothered to try: one assigns an image to the thing to be remembered. So one might assign the image of water to 'das' and then, to remember the gender of a neuter noun, assign a mental image to the noun and associate this with water. One assigns the image of a woman to 'die' and then, to remember a feminine nouns, assigns it a mental image and associates this with a woman. In one's mind, then, one might have a sofa, a book, a knife, floating in a pool. And so on.

At the beginning of the class the teacher did an experiment to see how well students memorised things using the techniques they already had. Students were given a list of 20 words, each of which had been assigned one of three articles invented for the occasion (fif, led, had). They were given three minutes to memorise the articles; asked to chat among themselves for two minutes; then given a test on the articles.

The number of correct replies reported was:

2 6 6 7 8 8 9 9 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 17 18 19

(I got 15.) The teacher asked those who got 15 or better what they did. One girl said she memorised the nouns for 2 articles, because everything else would take the third. (This was esentially what I did: write down two lists and memorise those.) Another (who got 19) said she constructed a story using images from one group of nouns, another story for another.

The teacher spent the rest of the class explaining how the visualisation technique worked. At the end he gave another test, again with 20 nouns and 3 invented articles, asking us to try the visualisation technique. I got 20. The results for the class were

(pairing results with original results):
18 20 20 20 20 18 20 19 19 18 17 20 20 19 20 20 19 19

or (in ascending order)

17 18 18 18 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

We can summarise by saying that on the first text only 3 people got a score of 17 or higher, while on the second test no one got a score below 17; on the first test no one got 20 right, while on the second 9 (almost 50%) did. But it's easier to see the dramatic shift in the distribution of scores with a couple of graphs:




(Yes, yes, the information definitely could be better presented, but there is work to be done.)

Now, we can't be sure the improvement was entirely due to use of the visualisation technique. I used a combination of visualisation and the two-lists trick (i.e. bothered to visualise only two sets). Since another member of the class had mentioned this trick, it's quite possible that others in the class were also combining the two. Still, it's pretty impressive. The only problem is, the technique is of limited use in mastering the art of German articles.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it's fairly straightforward to correlate a mental image with the article 'der' and then associate this images for appropriate nouns. It's not at all straightforward to come up with a system of mental images such that 'der' is associated with masculine singular nouns in the nominative, feminine singular nouns in the genitive and dative, and plural nouns in the genitive. It's by no means obvious how to organise one's mental images so that 'den' is associated with masculine singular nouns in the accusative and plural nouns in the dative.

Now, recycling is a very good thing when one is dealing with scarce resources. It's not obvious that articles, whether definite or indefinite, fall in that category. Instead of cunningly reusing 'der' (so that it turns up not in one case but three), why not use it exclusively for the nominative masculine singular? And have a unique form for the genitive feminine singular? And another for the dative feminine singular? Go on, you want to say, be a devil!

The problem is, natural languages are not like programming languages. There's no one issuing a beta release and then fixing all the things that interfere with performance (for instance, by slowing down processing, taking up too much memory to store...). We can't fix the languages, so we have to fix the learners.

The interesting thing about the class was that it showed the (to a foreigner) peculiar German reluctance to help those grappling with the system of articles. It's not peculiar that the man in the street has better things to do with his time, of course, but schools are unanimous in shying away from the dreary task. This school was unusual only in ducking the issue in a course specifically advertised as addressing it.

fixes

I spent the weekend on an intensive course in CSS at the Volkhochschule in Alt-Mariendorf. Given a choice I would rather not have learnt CSS, but things kept going wrong with my website. The purpose of the website is to enable professional existence to continue at times when I am lying on the floor staring at the wall, I will not say unable to move but unable to interact with my fellow man without a reenactment of that film with Richard Gere and Edward Norton. When things go wrong with the website, however, it is necessary to interact with my fellow man, or, more specifically, with the friend who set up the website in CSS and is currently the only person capable of setting it to rights. The strain at times (o petty concerns, how can I think of my petty concerns when tomorrow is Super-Tuesday but wotthehell) of being pleasant instead of lying motionless on the floor is such that no excess amiability is available for dealing with possible professional associates. Publishers, producers, potential payers of bills.

Although I would rather have been working on a book than learning CSS it turns out to be profoundly interesting. As you probably know (i.e. the odds are that 90% of you already know more about these things than I do), websites are realised differently on different browsers. So the languages in which you write for the web are forced to confront an issue natural languages ignore: how to allow for, or rather preempt, different interpretations. Any sentence one uses in a natural language is going to undergo distortions depending on the person reading or hearing it; with natural language sentences, however, we can't really adjust for anticipated distortions. Working with CSS shows you the level of analysis that's necessary if a language operates in an environment of guaranteed distortions and wants (OK, I am anthropomorphising shamelessly, tant pis) to ensure that a predeterminated "message" gets through. So it's exceptionally interesting - and it's also extraordinarily reassuring, because one has stepped into a little world where such things are subject to control. Not only has one stepped into a world where such things can be controlled, one has stepped into a world whose natives believe in purifying the language of the tribe and have done something about it.

The course was also a very good thing for an unrelated reason. Last week I managed to register with my language school for the last week of the preparatory course for the TestDAF - the course they refused to let me sign up for at the beginning of term. On Friday we had a model test in Reading Comprehension and another on Hearing Comprehension. The first was straightforward, the second worrying. Luckily I had signed up for the intensive course in CSS, in other words for 2 days of 6 straight hours of German in a natural environment. I wish I'd know earlier how helfpul this would be, total immersion in a context where the speaker is not making allowance for language learners. Not to mention coffee and meal breaks when a wide variety of styles of speech could be heard, and stumbling attempts at speech imposed on innocent native speakers. Fantastic.

This morning I turned up for Axel's course and got the result of our test last week. According to Axel I did not really need to take the course, because I got 12 out of a possible 12 - but this is really just a case of Axel being large-minded about the fleabitten carcase which I send out into the world as German. In the afternoon I turned up for the terrifying TestDAF course, where we did various exercises on grammar and vocabulary. When a word was unfamiliar to the class my fellow-students had a habit of explaining it to other fellow students with the English term (Eindecker = monoplane, Libellen = dragonflies). (Awwww.) After the break we had a written test, an essay to be written with a graph on self-employment as a starting point. I wrote madly, committing grammatical howlers right and left, having failed to wear a watch and so having no idea how much time was available.

I think these activities are not the sort of thing people generally associate with the writing of fiction. It's interesting to see how things actually work.

integration

Signed up for another month at my language school. My teacher said he thought I could skip two months and move on to the preparation course for the next level of exams. I'm not convinced this is the best course to take next, but he is an exceptionally gifted teacher; it cheers me up to turn up at 9 and watch him in action for 3 hours.

Today he talked about the days before the fall of the Wall. When he was young West Berlin was a demilitarised zone, by requirement of the Americans, French and British; this meant that Germans living in West Berlin were exempt from military service. At the time he thought Communism was A Good Thing and would go out on anti-American demos against the Vietnam War; West Berlin was a good place to do this, because the S-Bahn belonged to East Berlin, even the parts that were in West Berlin. Even the tracks were East German. So demonstrators could disappear into an S-Bahn station, or jump onto the tracks, and the West German police couldn't do anything. When his family came up from Karlsruhe to see him they all wanted to see East Berlin, so they would all go over for the day; it was necessary to pay 20DM per person per day to do so. That is, they were required to exchange 20 DM per person into Ostmarks, but prices were so low it was impossible to spend them. A meal in a restaurant would cost 1.35 Ostmarks. One might buy a book; it would cost 1.75 Ostmarks. It was strictly forbidden to take Ostmarks back to West Germany; if one was caught carrying Ostmarks one could get a year in prison. People would think, OK, I'll give them to an Ossi; they'd see someone near the station who looked like an Ossi and try to hand over the money. But this was dangerous because it was forbidden to have any contact, the Stasi was everywhere watching, someone who was caught could face 5 years in prison.

There is a deal for immigrants and refugees that I am just too competent to benefit from. Foreigners who have been in Germany a long time - those who have married Germans, or have the right to stay for some other reason, or are EU citizens, or some others - are legally entitled to 600 hours of German language instruction and 45 hours of Orientation. Those who are unemployed get this for free; the rest pay 1 euro an hour, the remainder subsidised by the government. Unfortunately the Integrationskurse only cover linguistic instruction up to Level B1, which I have just completed, and the deal covers only designated courses, not any course at the relevant level. It's a bit silly, because part of the point is to facilitate employment, and the level of competence certified would not be enough to qualify one for much of a job. Be that as it may, I thought this was a fabulous deal that might be of some use to the incomparable TAR ART RAT, who is married to a German, has lived here for years, gets by in German but has an approach to the grammar which is an invention of his own. I thought he might extract grammatical enlightment from the B1 end of the range. Which he might well. Unfortunately - and again idiotically, given the purpose of connecting participants with employment - none of the language schools offering IK have evening courses, or rather the only evening courses start at 5.45 or 6.

There have been pieces in the press deploring the fact that only about 45 percent of participants complete the course and take away a certificate, also that only a tiny proportion land a job. It's hard to see this as surprising, given that those providing the courses have neatly eliminated from the pool all the people who have managed to land some kind of job. TAR ART RAT works for a PR firm, but it's easy enough to imagine people who, without being positively unemployed, are underemployed - making less use of their skills than they could - for want of better linguistic competence. The fact that there is no support for the level of study that would qualify people for good jobs presumably means that the not-so-good jobs are heavily oversubscribed. Not that it is not a good thing as far as it goes, better than anything comparable in the US or Britain.

Anyway, meanwhile, no good deed goes unpunished. Over a year ago, in December 2006, I gave a end-of-book party to celebrate the second completion of Your Name here, and I sent an invitation to a reader who had sent me an e-mail, a Russian musician. It is not possible, obviously, to invite people to a party without disclosing one's address. It is not normally necessary to spell out the fact that an invitation to a party does not constitute a standing invitation to turn up one's doorstep. So there has been a year of phone calls and reader on doorstep. Most of the time I leave the phone unplugged to avoid interruptions. I have explained that I don't like people turning up uninvited. To no avail. Perhaps I should move to China.

testing testing

I have a couple of books on the TestDAF, a test of German proficiency for foreign students who want to study at a German university. I thought I'd have a look at them. I had a look. The test was clearly devised by someone who is completely bonkers.

The written and oral sections of the test both require the candidate, among other things, to summarise the statistical information presented in a graph and comment on it. The oral section also requires the candidate, among other things, to demonstrate that he or she can competently chat with fellow students about sport, vacations and the like.

The first of these makes perfect sense for the many students who come to Germany to study 'technical' subjects with a substantial quantitative component. It's simply irrelevant to the type of student who comes to Germany to study, as it might be, classics, or philosophy, or, um, German literature. One might perfectly well be able to quote from memory

Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten
Das ich so traurig bin
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten
Das kommt mir nicht aus den Sinn

or

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat baut sich keines mehr
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

and yet stare appalled at a bar graph. Same for the wretched candidate who has toiled through the Kritik der Reine Vernunft or the Phänomenologie des Geistes and for one reason or another wants to study philosophy on German soil. I am all for statistics, I like statistics, but that has nothing to do with the question of whether the ability to speak fluently for 90 seconds on a statistical subject has a bearing on one's ability to cope with philosophical German. And as for sport! I submit that the ability to chat about football in German - well, what I submit is that the anglophone philosophers I have known would be unable to chat fluently about football or cricket in their native tongue, so it would be a bit hard on them to ask them to come up with 60 seconds of friendly chat in a foreign language as a prerequisite for studying, as it might be, Frege.

The thing that really is odd, anyway, is that the test gives the candidate no opportunity to show knowledge of, as it might be, Heine or Rilke, Kant or Hegel, Adorno or Habermas. The teacher of my German class says 80% of foreign students at German universities fail to finish a degree. I wonder if this is so very surprising. If you require foreign students to demonstrate that they can engage in chit-chat about football and holidays, and make no attempt to determine whether they are competent in the area of German relevant to the subject they wish to study, you are not selecting for students with the best chance of profiting from study at a Germany university; you're selecting for the type of student who has a good chance of making lots of friends in, as it might be, Berlin. If you require students to engage with randomly selected scholarly texts, you're again failing to select for the kind of student who has sensibly focused on the kind of German necessary for his/her field of specialisation. There is, I comment in passing, every reason to expect such a student to have worked on the language independently, precisely because most language programmes share the broadbrush approach of the test.

Anyway, there is more to be said, but work to be done.

the examination mafia

I went up to Lichtenberg last week to register for the TestDAF, the Test für Deutsch als Fremdsprache, which most universities accept as proof of German proficiency. Our teacher has been discouraging members of the class from attempting it without further preparation (we are in Mittelstufe 1, he recommends completion of Mittelstufe 2, which would take another 3 months). Today we were told again about the difficulties presented by the exam - 3 reading comprehension passages in 60 minutes! 2 hearing comprehension passages in 60 minutes! 7 oral expression tests!

This simply shows yet again why it's more or less impossible for me to find a class at the right level. When we do reading comprehension in class I'm finished in 5 minutes. I understand the hearing comprehension passages first time round. Let's put it this way, if you can read Habermas in German you are not going to find yourself struggling with the TestDAF. If you have managed to read Wilamowitz' seminal (and by no means short) Asianismus und Attizismus in its native tongue you are unlikely to stare appalled at anything the TestDAF can throw at you. My problem is simply that I've can't speak or write grammatical German. There are plenty of people in this position in Berlin, but there are no classes for them. (Having said all that, if I'd gone to this school rather than Akkusativ 2 and a half years ago I would have kept slogging away and would certainly have ended up more proficient than I am now.)

Our teacher, anyway, talks about the Prüfungsmafia (the examination mafia). The school used to hold exams every other week, and they were always full, with 50 or 60 people; then the school dropped back to once a month, and the rooms were half empty. Where were all the people? They started hearing a name: Friedländer. This was a language school allegedly established by academics from East Germany who found themselves politically incriminated after the fall of the Wall. The school was closely linked with the Humboldt Universität (our teacher nods and winks), so students who passed its exams were always accepted. Students were allegedly studying at our school and taking exams at the Friedländer, where they could be sure of passing. The Friedländer was now allegedly making its exams harder because none of the other universities would accept its qualifications. Our teacher talks about a feud between our school and the Goethe Institut: the Goethe Institut holds exams which are open to external students, but students from the Goethe Institut always got excellent marks while those from our school did not do so well - despite the fact that our school's course is allegedly harder.

This is all very entertaining; the thing that remains baffling, however, is that it is so hard to find a course that is suitable for adults. Most of the students already have advanced degrees in their country of origin; they want to use German to study at university or pursue a career. It's peculiar to do exercises for page after page of Konjunktiv I about a man and wife squabbling over the housework. Our teacher frequently makes the point that the TestDAF requires one to read wissenschaftliche Texten, but that is certainly not the intellectual level of the sentences covered in class. (The last school I tried was even sillier; I'm not convinced that I would have done better at another school. And this course is in fact MUCH better than a course I took at the Goethe Institut in London years ago, which was completely disorganised.)

One thing that's good about this system, anyway - something that compares favourably with that prevailing in most school systems. I'm now in my third week in a class where I'm learning some things but am in other ways dramatically overqualified. But the fact is, the teacher can tell the class 'Leute, Leute, es gibt wissenschaftliche Texten' and warn them off and I can go up to Lichtenberg and sign up and take it anyway. I'm not stuck in this class for a year. How much better school would have been, how much less excruciatingly boring, if it had been possible to sit an external examination in a subject after a month and skip up to a more challenging class!

...Later... I have been having a look at sample oral expression tests in a book I bought a while ago. This may not be such a walkover, given that I'm not much given to talking even in English. Three weeks left to prepare, though. Perhaps all will be well.