Second Language Acquisition and My Marriage

Last night I made a porcini mushroom sauce with penne pasta for dinner. If you like mushrooms, I highly recommend porcini. A common occurrence at our house, some question led Matt to wiki "porcini" and that of course led to discovering that portobello mushrooms are the same as your average button mushroom, only older. Then Matt looks at the German wiki page and eventually comes to Pfifferling. I say I don't think I've ever had Pfifferling. He says, "Of course you have, don't you remember the Pfifferlingsalat in Berlin?" Which then I did remember. Let me tell you, dear reader, about the Pfifferlingsalat in Berlin:

After visiting all of the certified dealers of Erzgebirge woodcraft in Berlin, Gretchen, Matt and I stopped at a little deli somewhere in Prenzlberg because it was dark and cold and we hadn't eaten dinner. Looking over the salads, I said "'Pfifferlingsalat'. I wonder what Pfifferling is." Matt looked at me and said "It's a kind of mushroom." I am amazed. He's only been learning German for six months yet somehow he knows the name for various mushrooms. "How do you know that?" I asked. "Don't you remember? Our guide up on the alp in Dorfgastein pointed them out on our hike," he replied.

I had no response to that because I was still so shocked. For one thing, that guide was speaking Austrian-accented German, so I was impressed that Matt with his then 3-month German had understood any of it. For another, Matt remembered that word, three months later, despite the fact that that word never came up again in those three months.

It was the Pfifferlingsalat incident that made me realize that Matt and I don't learn languages at all in the same way. Matt is a word man. He learns vocabulary quickly and it sticks. I had an inkling of this early on from the schwanger incident:

After about a month of learning German, Matt and I were conversing in German and he said something about someone being "schwanger." I raised my eyebrows because it didn't seem like the kind of word you learn in your first few weeks of a foreign language. I asked if he knew what it meant, and he said "pregnant". Still wondering, I asked where he learned it. He said, "Da machte sich auch auf Joseph aus Galiläa, aus der Stadt Nazareth, in das jüdische Land zur Stadt David, die da heißet Bethlehem; darum, dass er von dem Hause und Geschlechte David war: auf dass er sich schätzen ließe mit Maria, seinem vertrauten Weibe, die war schwanger." I couldn't believe he was quoting from memory the second chapter of Luke. "You've been reading and memorizing the Luther Bible?!" "No, no," he says, "I've just been listening to Bach's Christmas Oratorio."

But this ability isn't limited to languages he speaks. Here's the pompier incident of just a couple of weeks ago to show that his French vocab is better than mine:

We were watching Smiley's People, which is also a summer ritual. In one scene takes place in France and involves firefighters. As we're watching I think to myself, "what was the word for firefighters in French?" I was going through my memory of our gender-equality lecture in Strasbourg when everyone was talking about them. I remembered even looking up the word. I remembered driving past the fire station on the way in and out of Strasbourg. Now what was the word? Did it start with
p", I wondered to myself. "Oh look, the pompier have finally arrived" Matt said, out of the blue. Pompier. That's the word I was looking for. But how did Matt know it? He shrugged. "Common knowledge."

Matt, however, doesn't do grammar. Which is why he'll ask me still on occasion what the heck the dative case is suppose to be anyway.

As I'm sure you've picked up, the part of my brain that stores vocabulary is coated in Teflon. I find myself looking up the same words over and over again*. To make up for it, I do grammar and the grammar sticks. This is why I failed at listening comprehension in France but why I could grammatically correctly say in French "if I hadn't missed the train, I wouldn't have met my wife". This is also why I do well in reading-knowledge courses that allow liberal use of the dictionary.

So the repeat of the Pfifferling incident last night only reinforced my conclusion about how the two of us learn languages and that I obviously stink at vocab. (Although thanks to MA I finally made the connection in my head yesterday that Pfifferling=Chanterelles=Eierschwammerl (an Austrian word for it) and I do know the word Eierschwammerl and have eaten plenty of them since one of my host mothers in Vienna was an excellent cook and went mushroom hunting for them). Probably you can expand the vocabulary/grammar dichotomy to a greater picture of how we learn in general. Matt can recite on command "Ode on a Grecian Urn," but hates doing math and science. I haven't memorized a poem since "The Owl and the Pussycat" in grade school but I did well in all of the equation driven math and science.

If only we could harness his capacity for vocabulary and mine for grammar, maybe between the two of us we could actually communicate a foreign language. The best we can hope for is to produce offspring with both abilities. And the worst we dread is producing offspring with neither. Let me assure you, having taught intermediate German, there are students who have neither.

*I have a Middle High German anecdote about this, but I'll leave it for another post. To whet your appetite I will say that it involves a blonde, a viking, and a pack of cigarettes.