After 30 years in Boston as a moderately-successful performing artist (viz. I made more money than I spent), I moved to Germany. I was 54. I had fallen in love with a German woman (now my wife). And I had no job, no German and no clue.
Culturally and linguistically, I arrived in Germany a new-born child. The upside: as I toddled about everything was mysterious, magical and amazing. The downside: I had no idea what was going on around me and making baby sounds was completely ineffective when asking the nice girl at the farmers’ market the price of cherries.
In my first year I quickly discovered that Germans are significantly different from Americans. They look like us when you visit, but once you’ve moved in with them, you quickly discover that they’re playing a different kind of football.
About nine months after arriving in Germany, an English-teaching agency found me on Linkedin and offered me a job. For Germans, the only qualification to teach English is to be a “native speaker” which means, as an American I was born to be an English teacher.
They hired me to teach a two-week two-hours-a-day English class for the international conglomerate Bertelsmann. When I asked the agency chief about training, content, preparation, she pointed to a bookshelf the covered one wall of the agency and suggested, “Pick something intermediate.”
I divided the two hours into sections: conversation, vocabulary, role-playing telephone calls and business meetings. And we did a grammar exercise every day.
During the grammar exercise they became very earnest. I was encouraging and gave them every possible encouragement. And after the grammar exercise each day I’d ask, “So, how was that? That wasn’t so bad, was it?” And the students would tilt their heads to the side and acknowledge my question with a muttered: “Huh!”
With the exception of Pierre, my students were typical Germans: white shirts, black sport coat, black pants for the men, and a simple skirt and blouse for the women. Pierre, however, was French: he had a French accent, wore Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and was always at least 15 minutes late to class.
At the end of the first week I asked him, “Pierre, could you please come on time for class next week?” And he replied, “But I am French!” Concerned, I asked him how long he’d been in Germany. “Ten years,” he said. When I raised my eyebrows at this, he added, “I have a reputation to maintain!”
It was Tuesday of the second week and we’d just finished our grammar exericse. They seemed to be getting better, so I said, “That was good! Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” There was a moment of silence and then one of the women began to sputter, her face turned a bright red, and her body seemed to puff up like some kind of bird as she finally said, “Bu bu bu bu… but…. we HATE this!!” And everyone, glad that someone had finally said it, nodded in satisfied agreement. And, they gave me that uniquely German sixth-grade-teacher look that they use when speaking to children and idiot foreigners: “How could you not have known this? What kind of English teacher are you?”
When I told my wife, she said, “Oh, well ‘Huh!’ in German means ‘I hate it’.” Yes, how could I not have known this?
And that was my first introduction to the German Stummsprache, in which specific grunts, hmmms, and various primitive sounds are used to express emotions, thoughts and opinions. Without the use of words.