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4 responses to “Wochenende”

1. 

   Matthias Melcher

   May 24, 2026 at 3:03 am

   If you are currently interested in ‘verstehen’ and in German, you might like my post from a few years ago: https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2023/03/26/imagination-and-understanding/

   Reply
   1. 

      Doc Searls

      May 25, 2026 at 8:52 pm

      Great post. And now you have me reading more of your blog, which is also great stuff. Thanks for keeping the blogging flame going!

      Reply
2. 

   Laurence Brevard

   May 24, 2026 at 5:56 am

   This story resonates with me. I had four semesters of German in college. Three were the FIRST semester!

   When I started Rice University in 1966, any math, science, or engineering degree required two years of a foreign language: German, French, and Russian were the choices. My 3 years of Spanish in High School was of no use.

   As much of my heritage is German (despite a French name), I chose it.

   Semester one went poorly – Rice used the system where 1 is the best grade and 5 was failing. I received a 5- but when I asked the professor if that meant closer to 4 (maybe?) I think he yelled at me – in German.

   The second semester of that year was a repeat of the first, explicitly for those who flunked it. I managed a 3.

   The next year (my junior year), I couldn’t take the second half of the first year until the second semester (spring 1969). I was failing it along with at least three other courses, realized I could not pull out of the dive, and managed to drop out the last day of classes. Otherwise I would have flunked out.

   I immediately (that very summer) enrolled for 13 hours at night at the University of Houston as 1969 was a very bad year to lose a student deferment! I got that back after about a month of worry. [Later I got a high lottery number.]

   Thinking that I was somehow going to have to make it through two years of German, I enrolled at U of H in the first semester of first year German even though it would obviously be not for credit.

   That time… I got an A+ and an award (which I tried to decline) for “Outstanding First Year German Student” – a book of plays by Schiller (Auf Deutsch, natürlich!). I still have it. Read it? Uh…

   But then… When I returned to Rice in the fall of 1970, having decided that U of H put me on a much less desirable career trajectory, it seems they completely dropped the foreign language requirement.

   Twenty years later with a couple of Electrical Engineering degrees and working on an obscure standard, I went to Germany for the first time.

   Before the trip I dug out some language tapes (cassettes) and did a bit of practice to try and have some level of “tourist” German.

   A strange thing happened over the next six years of travel to Germany. I became fluent enough to purposely stay at places where they didn’t speak English.

   Somehow I managed to start hearing German as just another way to say something and my vocabulary expanded rapidly.

   It completely transformed my relationship with my German colleagues because they could never be sure just how much I understood!

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   1. 

      Doc Searls

      May 25, 2026 at 8:43 pm

      Congrats on that! Wish I’d stayed with it as well as you finally did.

      I’ve also failed to learn French on the job, during the time I consulted a big (now deceased) client in France, thirty years ago or so. I would spend two weeks at a time in Paris and nearby cities, determined every trip to just memorize twenty words a day. I’d work at that and the next day would remember two or three.

      But a Swedish colleague there told me about a guy he knew who came from the US and had a helluva time mastering French until one day, about a year into the struggle, he got hugely pissed at someone, and snapped into fluent, barely accented French. Everyone clapped. He broke through.

      Had I more time in France or Germany, something like that might have eventually happen, but at my age it’s a very long shot.

      Reply