German society preparing subjects for conversation

Every topic has a limited vocabulary and set phrases.

A dictionary might translate our choice of word to a perfectly correct German translation, but that word might not be the one a German would have chosen.

Thesaurus is der Thesaurus. Except they use das Lexikon, der Wortschatz, das Synonymenwörterbuch, der Wortvorrat, das Glossar, die Wortliste. None of these are what I would call a thesaurus. A lexicon is a glossary, a word choice is how someone speaks, a synonym is something I’ve not seen since English literature. Does it mean similar words and words which mean the opposite, or drift slightly in meaning? A word suggestion is how a writer conveys feeling.

However, we need a starting point before anyone will engage with us enough, that we can pick up on the nuances. Ich fahre unter der Brücke is close enough. Ich fahre unter der Brücke durch, is grammar which hasn’t been taught in Britain since the 1950’s, but is still used by the Germans today.

It would be racist to say that the British do not learn foreign languages well because we have lazy mouths or we are arrogant. Lets examine some better reasons.

A baby hears sounds lots of times before it tries to make those sounds. That second phase lasts a long time. In our schools, we forego hearing sounds until we recognise them and can predict what they are going to sound like. Nor do we allow the trying phase. It’s a few repetitions, often by someone whose authentic reproduction has, it has to be said, an English accent. Then we have to rapidly achieve, or we are dismissed as useless. If it damages our inclination to learn languages for life, that is a worthy outcome because we are an embarrassment. Sound familiar? The rest of the world is exposed to foreign sounds much earlier and hears them daily and we readily forgive them for having a strong foreign accent.

We don’t move our lips. We are deceived into thinking that is the problem, yet the lips are only an effect of what is really going on. Sound is made by the jaw, tongue and cheeks. We don’t know even where our tongue is and we’ve never seen a trapezoid of where sounds are made in the mouth. A diphthong is something Latin, not a movement from one vowel position to another. In Arabic there are two D’s, two T’s and two S’s. The jaw drops and hey presto you’ve got it. There is a h after one of the S’s, Sa-huh. Once you are told, you know it for ever. Until then, we have lazy mouths.

We know the grammar. Nought and zero both signify minimum value. Nach aus zu bei seit mit von gegenüber. Nach dem, nach der is preset. We can get the rest from that. What we don’t know is, is it der die or das Büro. Yes we can learn patterns of word endings, -shaft, -chen, but guess what. Some of the first words we learn don’t follow the patterns. Yet no-one points that out and we are constantly making a mistake which is in plain sight but hidden from us. We never get around to learning the loan words or foreign words which don’t follow the patterns. When you know they exist, where do you start? With a dictionary, word at a time and in ten years you’ll be blind.

We learn things which are learning the language, but are irrelevant to our lives. We don’t learn enough about football to use it at break time. We can’t do anything in any foreign language, except in that parallel universe which is the classroom. Yet the rest of the world starts off with the language they use in every day life. Correct grammatical patterns emerge and the language is expanded. Why can’t we do that!

The answer is politically incorrect. We haven’t got the connection with native speakers, because we are an island, because we are mainly taught second hand, by non-native speakers and here’s the politically incorrect part, because the type of person who sounds authentic and goes on to get an honours degree and become a teacher, is generally a certain type of person. Not someone whose interests are shared by the rest of us, so not someone whose choice of language is anything that the rest of us would remotely relate to. Someone who is politically correct and wouldn’t laugh at, or understand, the newspaper headline, the island of apes voted to remain with Britain.

How can we transform from where we are now, to where we need to be? Perhaps making the path easier for others to follow? Every topic has a limited vocabulary and set phrases.

The plan is to collectively develop themes, to the point where a native speaker could see a worth-while outcome in helping us, by modelling better sentences which we would never have come up with, in a month of Sundays.

To achieve that, we need a web presence.

The European Common Language Framework grades any language capability, to a standard that is recognised across Europe. From A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 to C2. The Zertifikat Deutsch follows this and seems somewhat more German than our GCSEs. That might be a worthy goal, but our starting point is the language we would use in our daily lives.