Dec. 5th, 2007 09:12 pm
Metasprache
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muckefuckI tried to write an entry in German about meeting Nuphy's visiting professor friend as a companion piece to my account of chatting up the dishy young Colombian at La Fonda yesterday, but the prose is coming out so stiff it's just no fun at all. They may be my biggest barrier to language mastery: I have trouble accepting the way I come across in anything I'm not absolutely fluent in. With languages I'm still picking up (like Chinese), I'm so happy that anything reasonably comprehensible comes out of my mouth that I don't have much time to worry about how childish and awkward it sounds. It's not the same with something like Spanish, where I have enough of a feel for good style that I can easily hear how dull and rude I sound and it's worst of all in German, a language in which I used to be able to converse quite fluidly but now have trouble spitting out a fully grammatical sentence. In English, I'm quite glib and clever and charming, but in anything else some of that goes missing and I'm too vain and insecure to watch it go willingly.
*seufz*
In any case, she was quite friendly and good-humoured and I do hope I get to see her again before she returns to Hamburg. She's quite smitten with Chicago in spite of a rough introduction (she told me about being caught in a tornado back in August--how did I miss this?) and has taken to HotTix like a seal to saltwater. I think I was reasonably engaging in return and she did pay me the ultimate compliment of asking what part of Germany I was from originally. So go me: My hesitations and lapses sound more like the mother tongue of someone who's been in the States for years than the rusty second language of a promiscuous polyglot. It's all in the accent: My blessing and my curse.
*seufz*
In any case, she was quite friendly and good-humoured and I do hope I get to see her again before she returns to Hamburg. She's quite smitten with Chicago in spite of a rough introduction (she told me about being caught in a tornado back in August--how did I miss this?) and has taken to HotTix like a seal to saltwater. I think I was reasonably engaging in return and she did pay me the ultimate compliment of asking what part of Germany I was from originally. So go me: My hesitations and lapses sound more like the mother tongue of someone who's been in the States for years than the rusty second language of a promiscuous polyglot. It's all in the accent: My blessing and my curse.