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I’ve been trying way too hard with my German

I love languages. English, German, Mandarin, Java, Hypolocrian—it’s all good. I’m not yet fluent in any of these, but I like to tinker. I like to catch thoughts as near back to the core of their creation as possible, then contort and pervert them, stretching them across strange jungle gym formations in my thoughtspace.

Here in Germany, I’m quite proud of my linguistic ability. German is far and away my strongest foreign language, so I can have some serious fun with it. (I still suck at Bavarian, Frankish, and Swabian, so don’t go there.) Although I still have a deplorable American accent, I’m quite fluent, and can joke and converse freely. When I first got here, it was quite a challenge for me to learn casual, slangy German, as I first learned the language on paper, and had no experience speaking it or even hearing it be spoken.

Some of the Americans here have a different perspective, and have picked it up mostly through conversation, not by combing through Goethe line by line or translating poetry for fun. These individuals are completely lost when it comes to differentiating between the dative and genitive case, who are clueless when it comes to proper declension of adjectives, because Germans typically slur over that stuff when speaking. To quote Mark Twain:

I say to myself, “REGEN (rain) is masculine–or maybe it is feminine–or possibly neuter–it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either DER (the) Regen, or DIE (the) Regen, or DAS (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well–then THE rain is DER Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being MENTIONED, without enlargement or discussion–Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is DOING SOMETHING–that is, RESTING (which is one of the German grammar’s ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it DEM Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something ACTIVELY,–it is falling–to interfere with the bird, likely–and this indicates MOVEMENT, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen.” Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop “wegen (on account of) DEN Regen.” Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word “wegen” drops into a sentence, it ALWAYS throws that subject into the GENITIVE case, regardless of consequences–and therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop “wegen DES Regens.”

Speaking German is a real party and a half. Although I’ve repeatedly assured friends here not to stress about these grammatical trivialities in casual conversation, as der, die, das, and dem pretty much all become dɛ when speaking quickly, there’s something alluring about mastering such absurd complexity. Understandable.

Well, it turns out that at least in French, native speakers can’t make up their minds about gender.

Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.

[…]

There’s an even more interesting twist in Ayoun’s native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers’ native-language abilities are identical to adults’ abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, ‘target’. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Must be all those damn lolcats. (I would so love to see lolcats in French.) While it’s quite easy to have a “damn teenagers” attitude about this, I’ve found it quite remarkable here in Bavaria how many of my German peers seem able to flip effortlessly between blessed High German and whatever dialect is native to them (e.g. Bavarian, Frankish, Swabian). While it could be construed that such frequent transition would facilitate the proliferation of variation and inconsistencies, I must note that the young people I speak with very consciously categorize their speech patterns. In other words, they know that in High German it’s “die Butter,” and that only the goofy old Bavarian people around town say “der Butter.”

Polyglotism has a lot going for it, to be sure. I’m not convinced, however, that it contributes as substantially to the occurrence of linguistic variation as monolingualism does. Either way, I’m damn glad to know that it’s “wegen des Regens.”