My next post doesn´t exactly describe a happy moment, it is more about the way I felt about moving to a new country without knowing the language:
And then I realized what language
can mean.
It can weave into your identity, modify or
model your way of thinking, support your thoughts.
It becomes a part of you, which can be lost
like any part of a puzzle.
The homeland of my mother always
meant a lot to me. Through her influence I was guided through childhood and
youth with the background of Slavic mentality. Sometimes almost in a clash with
my father´s principles—rooted in Germanic culture. I remember my attempts to
learn Serbian before moving to Novi Sad, and I remember them as not very
successful. The rhythm and melody of the Serbian language are completely
different to any other European language I had learned until then. The fact
that in my earliest childhood, my mother used to talk to me in Serbian, didn´t
make it easier. The phrases and words acquired back then subconsciously, had
been sorted out by my brain as soon as I started to go to kindergarten, where everyone used my native language, German. Being
responded to exclusively in German, my mother gave up her attempts of raising
me bilingually, and my ´´Serbian puzzle´´ fell apart.
I decided to put my learning on hold until my move to Novi
Sad, the city of my heart. I remember the day I arrived as if it were
yesterday, everything was exciting and new and the few ``negative´´ aspects I
simply idealized. Unfinished streets seemed just adventurous. Ruined houses
added to a certain Mediterranean charm. It was a sunny day—the air already hot
at the beginning of April. I remember street signs and advertisements written
in Cyrillic passing in front of my eyes. Of course, I couldn´t decipher them,
but they seemed beautiful to me, artistic, somehow resembling hieroglyphs.
After my arrival, I was surrounded
by that language of my earliest days and I loved it. The rolled `r´ makes it
temperamental. Luckily, I didn´t have to replace `r´ with `l´, the not all that
discrete trick of German speakers who can´t roll the `r´, for example in
Italian opera arias; sounds odd. After a few weeks in the secure environment of
friends and family, who all knew English, I had to admit that engaging my
musically educated ear would not be enough to acquire a language. A Summer
School for Serbian helped me to master the basics of the language in the safe environment
of other foreigners. But that was just the basics, my real trial was reality
afterwards. I found myself able to lead a minor conversation, but unable to
really express my thoughts, not to mention my inability to make humorous
comments of any kind. Also, it was almost impossible for me to follow a fast
conversation with noise in the background, which is really hard to avoid when
going out with friends. At least by then I could read the Cyrillic
advertisements on my way home and add some lines on my own. In my head of
course, I wouldn´t want to become a foreign criminal.
I guess my temporary despair and
helplessness in expressing my thoughts was my share of cultural shock. A pretty
mild one, I must admit. But it led me to fully understand the ``one language,
one self´´ paradigm, the linguist Michael Erard mentions. According to him,
speaker, citizen and self are governed by the same linguistic norms. I felt
pretty relieved, when I realized that there is even a scientific explanation
for my feeling uncomfortable—the linguistic norms of my self and the citizens
around me couldn´t have been more different. But, step by step, I recognized
words I had read in the speech of others (a euphoric feeling every time, even
if the word in question was only a tiny connection word), I could make up word
plays which I had loved so much in my mother tongue (well, that was a whole Ode
to Joy playing in my head, with all parts of the orchestra) and I almost didn´t
have to lipread anymore in noisy surroundings (and a decent amount of
lipreading is pretty common in today´s noisy society anyway). With the
acquisition of vocabulary through everyday situations, I started to take on the
Serbian way of communicating as well. I began to think in Serbian and to
replace the long and complicated German sentence structures with short,
straightforward Serbian ones. Herein language mirrors the culture and
interaction of the citizens of a country perfectly. I noticed that Germans wrap
up their thoughts, they tie a rope of endless multi-clause sentences around
them. Serbs, on the contrary, communicate their thoughts directly and
straightforwardly in short, clear sentences. And in this way they act as well.
There is little hiding, or beating around the bush. Thoughts are communicated. Mostly
immediately. Negative and positive. After a while, through the language, I
learned the culture. Through the culture I learned the behaviour. And finally,
through the behaviour I partly formed a new identity. Partly, of course, I am
still what I am. But I am that in a Serbian way.
A few days ago I was at a German
barbecue. I felt unbelievably insecure talking in German, my sentences
resembled Serbian sentence structure. Somehow I felt as if I was walking on ice
with every new thought I wanted to communicate. It has been a few years since I
moved to Serbia, but it is nevertheless startling how fast you lose parts of
the puzzle, even in your native language. But after all, change probably is the
only constant in our lives. And it is just impossible for the brain to keep all
the information after every change.
So, I was at this barbecue. Talking
on ice. And my conversational partner asked me: ``So, how long have you been
studying German for?´´ That was it. I had become completely immersed in, and
adopted, Serbian identity.
