sprechen - to speak

as i sit here doing my german homework i can't help but wonder if it is all in vain. when we first arrived i tried to speak german while out and about. then dan taught me the wonders of saying "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" which was most often responded to with a near accentless lie: "A little bit."

so, i stopped trying too hard. almost everyone would respond by saying they speak a little english and then engage us in discussions that are advanced for most of the native speakers i met in my freshman ethics class at IU.

but i want to leave here feeling as though i really got everything i could out of this experience. and i hear there's a german/american school in the bay area that is hiring... . so i am taking german class. that means that part of my homework is to interact with others in german.

now, this wouldn't be a problem, i like a little challenge, except it turns out that i have the worst american accent ever. i even had one man who didn't understand me when i explained very carefully and slowly that "mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut." i asked him if he spoke english. he said no and walked away. (unfortunately, he was the only waiter in the cafe so he had to deal with me pointing at the menu and pantomiming pizza - which is the same in german so maybe he just was a little slow.) once people hear my accent they immediately launch into english or get annoyed. i'm working on it, i say in german, trying my hardest to be my cute, charming self, but they don't care. they are far more interested in practicing their english than helping me practice my german.

at first i was annoyed. i would help someone trying to learn english in the states, i thought. but would i? if i had a line of people to help and one non-english speaker wanting to know the name of something they were buying i would be annoyed too. no matter how cute or charming they are.

i've never been one to, well, tough things out, exactly. i have a tendency to only do things for which i have a natural propensity. i had thought that language was one of those things. apparently not. this time, however, i'm not giving up. we have to eat and avoid major catastrophe. so i'll keep working on my basic german skills, if only to impress those back home who don't know better.