Re: minimal german

From: Nichael Lynn Cramer (nichael@sover.net)
Date: Fri Dec 04 1998 - 08:04:11 EST


martin.arhelger wrote:
>Every pupil in a German school learns English, even if he's going to be
>truck driver. (The only exceptions may be some few educationally handicapped
>children.)

This is even farther off the topic, but it's worth pointing out that the
operative word here is "learns".

It's very likely that Martin's truck driver could now carry on a reasonable
conversation with a stranger in English having studied it from the third
grade through the end of his studies.

OTOH when an American student says he has "studied" German (or French or
Russian or whatever), he typically means that he has taken four (or three
or two) semesters as an undergrad supplimented by, at best, a year or two
in high school. The net result being that with a good dictionary at his
elbow he could probably work through a technical paper in his field of study.

(I guess the point is that there's literate and then there's literate.
James Joyce's wife Nora is often held up as a target of dismissive
burlesque as the all-but-illiterate wife of a great genius. Yet as Richard
Ellman's makes clear in his biography of Joyce, this was a woman who spoke
three languages fluently. Likewise in discussing the description of
Shaxespere as having "little Greek and less Latin" Gary Taylor, in the
introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare, points out that Johnson was a vain
man who was --not doubt justly-- proud of his own learning and that WS,
being a product of the local grammar school, probably had "merely" the
equivalent of a modern masters degree in the Classics.)

But again, as I say, the state (and insularity) of American higher
education is pretty far off topic, I think I'll quit here.

N

--
Nichael Cramer
nichael@sover.net                        deep autumn--   
http://www.sover.net/~nichael/                   my neighbor what does she do

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