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I stood under the awning of a second-hand store somewhere in the Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln, caught between a summer breeze and the musty, cool air of the shop. While I hung back, my partner was chatting with the gruff shopkeeper. “I’ve lived here for two years,” he said. I knew he’d meant “I lived here two years ago,” but the old man didn’t. Funny what a difference an umlaut can make.
Without missing a beat, the shopkeeper responded, “Dein Deutsch ist aber schlecht.” But your German’s bad.
This was typical berliner Schnauze, and it became a running joke.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that getting used to being scolded was a formative part of my language learning experiences. While the berliner Schnauze can be off-putting, I appreciate that at least you always know where you stand with a Berliner.
In university, I went back to Berlin for a summer studying abroad. As I prepared to leave, the people around me raved about how lucky I was to have this opportunity to really learn the langauge. I believed them. I had done well—very well—at German classes. So, I reasoned, if I knew how to do German class, I must know how to learn German.
Here’s what I knew (or thought I did): Real life is nothing like language class (true). The best way to learn a language is to date someone who speaks it (undecided). Failing that, just chatting with strangers at your local Kneipe will get you there (false).
Most of the German I learned that summer I learned in class. I never did get good at chatting with strangers in bars. In retrospect, that shouldn’t have been a surprise—I haven’t mastered the art of the bar chat in English, either.
A few years later, I returned to Berlin for a master’s in European languages. As before, I came with high hopes. This time around, I’d have more time—years!—for learning German. This time around, I’d do all the right things. I’d be a social butterfly. I’d join clubs. If a fellow North American tried to make friends with me, I would run in the other direction.
In some ways, it worked out. All my new friends spoke German, the language of our classes as well as our cohort Stammtisch. But with those I knew well enough to visit at home (including, it must be said, several North Americans), it was English–or sometimes Russian–that dominated, with a smattering of other languages depending on who was around. Speaking German in more intimate settings felt wrong, so we usually didn’t.
Outside my program it was hard to meet locals. I joined clubs, played sports, went to concerts. The people were never unwelcoming, but always distant. Invariably, I felt stuck at the margins, like all I could do was peer through the windows at the interactions of more established (and more local) members. I tried the other extreme and went to language-learning clubs, but they were catering to the massive influx of mostly-techno-DJs who were just beginning to learn. That wasn’t my speed, either.
Over time, I started to feel guilty whenever I watched a movie in my dorm instead of—what? I didn’t even have a clear concept of what I should be doing, but I was sure there was something. I forbade myself from reading in English, thinking that this would motivate me to read in German. Instead, it just stopped me from reading. I felt guilty for hanging out with my English-speaking friends, even though they were an essential source of joy, an antidote to the isolation and stress of being an international grad student.
From here, my mind made some logical leaps:
- I should be doing more to learn German.
- If I did those things, I would be better at German than I am.
- Therefore, I am not good enough at German.
Just before I finished my program, my childhood friend came to visit. One day, we went to buy train tickets. It was a relatively simple interaction, but an unfamiliar one, and as it went on, I grew increasingly flustered. Once we left the counter, hard-won tickets in hand, my friend asked me, “Do you realize that in public you talk so fast and so quietly that no human could possibly understand you?” I hadn’t realized. I’d thought that my words just weren’t making sense.
I lived in Berlin for two years (*not* two years ago!), and despite successfully completing my program, navigating the infamous German bureaucracy, and making many friends, I never did shake the sense that I was failing in some way. I hear something similar from many of my friends who are newcomers to Quebec. While press coverage may sometimes say otherwise, my experience suggests that many of them want to learn French, have tried to learn French, and struggle to grasp why they just can’t seem to.
Once I returned to the US and started teaching English, I would see echoes of this in my students¾especially when it was their turn for a formative assessment. “Ay, teacher,” they’d say as they slipped through the door of the testing room. “I was never good in school.” “I’m too stupid to learn English.” “I’ve already tried everything.” If they seemed interested, I would talk through their learning approaches and offer ideas where I could. But most of all I tried to convince them that they weren’t the problem—that there were structural barriers that were preventing them from improving.
Back in Quebec, Paquet and Levasseur (2019) describe how even higher-level speakers of French as an additional language may “have used French for years without necessarily being recognized as legitimate, authentic, or even competent speakers” (380). Their participants described a sense of responsibility, even guilt, for “not doing enough,” even though the authors found that their lack of language learning opportunities was not a personal failing, but was produced by the society around them.
Case in point: the Montreal switch, the tendency of Montreal natives to change to English during an interaction that began in French. It’s an everyday frustration for French learners, for whom the post-conversation reflection (“What did I do wrong? What tipped them off?”) becomes a kind of ritual. People insist that the switch is just an indication of their desire to be accommodating, to ensure a smooth interaction (incidentally, this isn’t all that different from defenses of the berliner Schnauze). But that’s not how it feels. Getting switched on feels like failing a test that no one told me I was taking, and knowing that it might happen affects my language choices. It makes me feel guilty for approaching someone in French if I’m not completely sure what I need to say. It makes me hesitant to use French at all.
Over the last two years, I’ve refined my understanding of when and why the switch happens. Sometimes I trigger it by stumbling over my words or using the wrong adjective ending. But not every time. In fact, there’s only one thing I do that reliably—and I do mean 100% of the time—causes an otherwise successful French interaction to suddenly switch to English: saying my name. When I order food or make an appointment, I can get through the whole conversation in French without a hitch until the inevitable question:
“Votre prénom?”
“Kate, K-A-T-E.”
“Okay, it’ll be ready in fifteen minutes! See you soon!”
I’ve tested this by going by “Catherine,” even—on the advice of my luthier, “frenchifying” the pronunciation of my surname.
Catherine Hardin [katˈʁɪn arˈdɛ̃] does not get switched on.
Somehow, this knowledge doesn’t alleviate my language anxiety. In fact, it might even make it worse: Now not only is my use of French deemed illegitimate, but this decision is non-negotiable. The Montreal switch sends a clear message: “This is my language, not yours.” With a name like Kate, can it ever be mine? If not, should I even bother learning? But then, if I stop trying to learn, I will feel—and other people will think—that I should have done more.
When the shopkeeper criticized my partner’s German, we laughed it off as a cultural curiosity. And to some extent, it is—no one can gripe quite like Berliners, whose Meckern is a treasured social practice. But the shopkeeper’s belief that being a local granted him the authority to appraise and gatekeep our language use? That’s all too common, and it has real consequences. It puts language learners in an impossible situation, blaming them for not claiming the language they would never be allowed to claim anyway. Is it any wonder if they feel helpless?
We’re all predisposed to see failures as individual rather than structural. But blaming individuals for structural barriers is more than disingenuous—it’s harmful. It’s been a major source of language-learning anxiety for me, for my students, and for my friends. On a more practical note, it informs a sink-or-swim approach to integration that assumes that newcomers are choosing not to learn a new language —choosing precarity, choosing, perhaps, to accept a marginal position in their society. The problem with this should be clear: If you can swim, of course you’ll swim. If you can’t, taking away your life vest isn’t going to help. ”Sink or swim” is a false dichotomy, one that individualizes learners’ struggles and obscures the simple fact that the problem is actually the water.
When you misrecognize structural barriers as personal failings, you can miss opportunities to overcome them. But if you can find a way to pause and take a good look at the water that’s threatening to swallow you up, you just might find a sandbar.
Reference
G. Paquet, R., & Levasseur, C. (2019). When bilingualism isn’t enough: perspectives of new speakers of French on multilingualism in Montreal. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(5), 375-391.
