I have to say, learning German is far and away the best thing I'm doing these days. I am enjoying it on so many levels, it's hard to count them all.

First is the sheer pleasure of speaking the language. I've always felt as if I ought to know German (a sentiment which has heretofore kept me from learning it), and in fact, I do know quite a lot. I'm not fluent, by any means, but I have had significant exposure to the language since my mother was Austrian. I spent six weeks in Austria when I was four, and allegedly returned home speaking German fluently - and I can remember sitting on the kitchen floor with my father when I returned, conversing in German. I really like making the sounds of the German language; I can do them all, I think, except that I can't trill my Rs. And speaking the language makes me remember my mother speaking it, which is pleasant.

Also, we have a great deal of Austrian "stuff" around the house - a Mozart candle holder (a treasure!), a number of books, many, many WWII-era photos, and letters (in an indecipherable script), and bizarre tacky Bavarian kitsch. (I so desperately want a barometer where the woman comes out when it's sunny and the man comes out when it storms.)

I spent six weeks in Austria again, after my father died. I'd forgotten everything I knew as a four-year-old, of course, but I learned to understand an awful lot nonetheless. It was easy, since I was mostly listening to my mother talk to my grandmother about everything that had happened since they had last seen each other, and much talk had to do with my father's illness. I'd already heard all the stories in English, many times. I knew how my mother felt about all of those things, too. As a result, I came home knowing pretty well the circumstances under which you say something like "Ganz bestimmt!", for instance, and how you inflect it when you say it. It's a weird sort of patterning. (I used to joke that, since I was there with my mother, all I really learned to say on that trip was "Haben Sie Zunder?" and "Ein achtl weiss Wein, bitte!")

At any rate. The linguist in me loves to observe these patterns, and to think about what I know and don't know. I know a fair amount about child language acquisition, and I can see those ways in which I learn as I did when I learned English, and also the skills and intelligence I bring to language learning as an adult. When I start conjugating verbs in my head or muttering them under my breath, I remember the work of Ruth Weir, who audiotaped her slightly-shy-of-two-year-old son as he lay in his crib at night before falling asleep. He was doing exactly those kinds of repititions: "Car go, train go, Daddy go, Mommy go . . ."

I've spent most of my professional life thinking about how people learn language - of all sorts - and the chance to remember, yet again, how they all interrelate is really fascinating and fun. Using all our language abilities in the service of learning any one of them only accelerates the learning and increases the gains. My teacher says things like, "For some reason, the people who end up doing the best in the class are the ones who write out all of the dialogue in the homework, not just the answers." And I think, well of course: You should copy everything and say it out loud as you do so. Which is exactly what I'm doing, because I intend to learn this language.

Also, it's interesting to me that I seem to have some understanding of the underlying grammatical structures. I have a pretty good (but not infallible, by any means) sense of what part of speech a word might be, given its position in the sentence (or utterance, if we're being technical). I think this is why I feel like I understand everything the teacher says; she's often using words I don't know, but I know from the context of the class and of the sentence (or utterance) what they might be, and so I can usually figure them out. This feels to me like vestigial knowledge from when I was four. It doesn't seem anything like the process I used when I learned French. I knew quite a bit of French, but no matter how good I got, the problem with spoken French was always how to parse the word-stream into recognizable words. This is more like, I know where the noun begins (even if I don't know the noun) because I know where the article ends. (I don't know if I'm making this clear at all. Suffice to say that it feels very different.)

I'm getting pretty excited about where I might go with this, too. We have a currently not-too-active exchange agreement with a business school in Stuttgart . . . I'm mulling this bit of information over in my mind, turning it and turning it to see what I can make of it . . . Stay tuned.