Tschuessi! Mach's gut!

This is me, with our Polish friend Mariousz, who just left us. This is the first in a long set of good-byes, as my friends finish their programs, end their internships, and just generally skip the country over the course of the next weeks and months.

Mariousz was here for eight weeks, technically doing a practicum at the Academy (the building where my office is), but really concentrating his energies on learning German. When he arrived two months ago, he knew about 60 words of English and 25 words of German, and it is a credit to him and a commentary on his personality that he was able to leverage those meager building blocks so well. Eight weeks after his arrival he was having whole conversations, managing his life, flirting with the girls in his German class, and, it seemed to us, becoming smarter by the minute. It was impressive.

I didn't do half as good a job.

When I first arrived in Munich almost three years ago, my English was a perhaps a wee bit better than Mariousz's is, but my German definitely wasn't (and my Polish was really not up to par). The intensive German course I'd signed up for at the Goethe institute in Chicago had been cancelled due to lack of registration, so I was left to my own devices, which included a Berlitz cassette tape and a boring day job whose one advantage was the tape player on my desk.

Naive, optimistic and linguistically unprepared, I arrived and slammed immediately into the wall. Daily life was indecipherable, everything seemed familiar but operated on unfathomable rules. The language barrier was a noose tightening around my neck. I tried to corral all the words I knew into an obedient army that I could deploy to accomplish my every whim... but really, I just didn't have the numbers. I still remember that frustration in my bones, the acute sense of failure that accompanied every strained, humiliating interchange, the temptation to stay holed up in my room and avoid the pressure of having to come up with intelligible dialogue. Learning a new language by immersion is the best possible way, I am convinced. It also sucks big-time.

And Mariousz was a trooper. He breezed in barely able to string two words together, but didn't let it stop him. From the first day he was curious and intense, asking us questions multiple times until the mutual understanding reached the lower threshold of "communication". And he learned all the more quickly because of it. Kudos, Mariousz. You'll be missed!