A year and a half later

Been a while, eh? I’ve largely tended to post on Twitter, because it’s easier, and I can do it when I have an off-handed thought on the bus.  But German-language Tweeter and blogger 3c5x9 requested on Twitter a few months ago now that I actually write a blog update to my life in Germany.  Since it’s easy to procrastinate, thus I did.  I actually have a lot of thoughts, and if I actually don’t drop the blog for another few centuries, I might expand on them, but here are some highlights.

On the job

So I’m 18 months into this job, and I can say it was a very good choice.  If I may say so myself, Vera Demberg and I remain at the bleeding edge of computational psycholinguistics as well as at the intersection between theory, experiment, and application. We’ve defined for ourselves an ambitious problem: how to characterize the relationship between syntax, semantics, and overall cognition via the notion of “cognitive load,” the burden of cognitive processes on the language user.  Our main (but not exclusive) syntactic framework: Vera’s PLTAG formalism. Our semantic vehicle: Neo-Davidsonian event semantics.  Our experimental framework: eye-tracking, particularly pupil diameter as a measure of cognitive activity, and we use information-theoretic techniques to measure this from a language-internal side.  And our application: multitasking with language in an automotive setting.

We already have some interesting results on all these fronts, some published, some in the process of being published.  And on another note, I found I fit quite well into the intellectual culture here, give or take my in-Europe-unfashionable tendency towards Chomskyan minimalism.  I found myself adopted by the German comp. ling. community quite easily.  In a sense, some of my ways of thinking about things, particularly my interest in formal structure, never went as out of fashion as they have in North America—until recently.

Country

If you leave out the, uh, little matter of language, then Germany is basically 90% a Standard Developed Western Country.  People tend to work Monday-Friday, they draw cash from very familiar ATMs, they go to the movies or watch TV, some people eat at MacDonald’s, and soon, and so forth.  Salaried employees get a Lohnsteuerbescheinigung at the end of the year, which is just like a Canadian T4 or US W2 slip—good to know that tax returns, at least, are the same concept everywhere.

BUT, a lot of little details are contained in that 10%, especially if you’re coming from North America or possibly even English-speaking countries in general.  For example, the strange practice of Haftpflichtversicherung, widespread personal liability insurance.  It was only by chance that I even figured out it was necessary (prospective landlady trying to explain it to me and bugging out that I didn’t grasp the concept—turns out it wasn’t my German, I simply didn’t believe it).  The necessity of obtaining a Anmeldebestätigung from the Einwohnermeldeamt (residency registration from the resident’s office).  The widespread absolute Sunday closure of retail including basic supplies—unless you want to go to a gas or train station, where they will rip you off.  They have a special exemption because a carton of milk is obviously a necessary travel supply…

Not all differences, of course, are inconveniences, just so that you don’t catch me focusing on the negative.  During opening hours, the shopping concept is far cheaper and more convenient, at least for basic groceries.  The train network is heaven-sent, for a North American.  It’s a day trip for me to go to Frankfurt or Paris, and not terribly expensive either.  I have a nationwide smartphone plan and a USB data stick as well as unlimited DSL for a tiny fraction of what I was paying in the USA, for service that is no slower for my purposes and certainly at least as reliable. And the weather in Saarbrücken mostly suits me very well, very pleasant summers.

Some differences are simply neutral, and just have to be learned.  Now that I’ve had my current apartment for over a year, I’m learning the little differences in home maintenance.  You always say “Guten Appetit” before a meal with more than one person. (German eyeballs seem to fall out when I tell them that an equivalent custom doesn’t exist at least in North America.)  Little things like that.

Language

I had a bit of a head start on this, as I took four years of German classes when I was in high school in Ottawa.  This got me up to a fairly high level of “theoretical Deutsch”, meaning that I knew my Zustandspassiv from my Konjunktiv II.  It helps that I transitioned directly from there into linguistics, so that grammar has been at the forefront of my mind ever since.

Naturally, this wasn’t sufficient to become a participating member of society.  But it gave me a hook to progress quicker than circumstances would otherwise appear to afford—with help from the dearly-appreciated Max Planck Institute’s free language classes.  My current teacher has said that I could probably pass a B2 exam with a high score if I wanted to (language proficiency levels are standardized in Europe), and likely even C1—second highest official rank for foreign learners.  This does NOT mean that I am yet truly conversationally fluent, merely that in combination with some test-taking strategies, I can prove to the examiners that I am not an idiot, heh.

Conversational fluency requires actual conversation, and at work there are too many foreigners who don’t speak German for this to happen—what you get when you want to recruit highly-specialized researchers on the world market.  My reading proficiency is probably at C2 easily, otherwise, and I can make myself understood in written form.  But functioning in society really requires being forced to use the language, and very many foreigners who come here do not, especially when the workplace is international.  For me, part of the problem is confidence—I am a terrible pedant and am terrified of “hurting” the language through grammatical errors, like getting noun genders wrong!  Irrational, I know.

Still, there is a misconception that it is economical to live in Germany without German.  I strongly consider this a false economy.  Non-German learners simply forego many things, including things that could make their lives easier, cheaper, more convenient. Even a little bit of German proficiency can mean the avoidance of a stupid, expensive mistake. I may not yet be so great over the phone, but I am sure glad I do have some German experience.  (But, contrary to what you might think, my previous German experience was simply a happy coincidence—I didn’t choose Germany for German, but because it was a job I wanted.)

People and culture

Now we wade into thorny territory here, and what probably requires a separate blogpost.  So, let’s just say that brown people from English-speaking countries have a thoughtless belief that central Europe is white homeland of whiteness, where everyone is blonde and white—and many people I knew were sort of dubious about this aspect of my move.

Of course, for Germany at least, that hasn’t been true for a long time.  That someone is not exactly white doesn’t mean that their first language isn’t German or they weren’t born in a town outside of Stuttgart to German-speaking parents!  It is by no means all roses (or as Germans say, Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen), but…even if döner kebap comes from Turkey, it is as much a part of the fabric of German life as the stereotypical schnitzel, and what’s more, agonizing about what way it is part of German culture is also a part of German culture…

There’s room for a dozen blog posts here, and the truth is, German multiculturalism is more accidental and less planned/accepted/intentional than Canadian multiculturalism, and therefore not as far along.  But it is nevertheless a diverse society working on a ways to integrate its heritage into a demographically changing future.

And I’m a big fan of the subsidized opera and theatre, of German art and German museums, and the German temperament actually suits this Canadian quite well.

Food

German carnival food completely destroys American carnival food.  Reibekuchen (closely related to Jewish potato latkes), well, I’ll have them with or without Apfelmus. I wish Saarbrücken had more spicy food, but well, it’s a small city.

Politics

Once again, oh, boy.  Anyone who knows me well, knows that I am addicted to political and economic news.  Naturally, I am now addicted to German political news, and have Opinions.  (The capital O loses force for Germans, but anyway.)  That requires maybe a different post and maybe a pseudonymous blog.

But let’s just say that I’m a bit left of the political spectrum and am not a fan of German policy regarding the Euro and the Eurozone.  I do like German proportional representation much better than Canada’s Westminster-esque system, however.

Everything else and Zum Schluss

That only scratches the surface of what I haven’t (perhaps yet) blogged about.  As I said in a previous post, Saarbrücken is a nice, affordable city to live in.  It’s next to France, has great train connections in Europe, and friendly weather.  I made friends quickly here and got in touch with the anglophone expat community.  I could stand to find some activities in German other than MPI German classes, although time and, I think, a continuing lack of confidence have held me back.

Other themes I could have written more about: driving (people who prefer manual transmission are crazy, Germans prefer manual transmission, therefore…?), German television, shopping culture, the peculiarities of banking, rental contracts, and so on.  Maybe some other time.

Das deutsches Leben

Guess it’s long past time for a blogular update.  I moved to Germany a little over a month ago, and a heck of a lot has happened since, and I have hardly had much time to think about producing more bloggy goodness, though I’ve kept my Twitter feed updated.  Spent the first week or so setting up my status as an immigrant to Germany and employee of the University of the Saarland.  Some of this is not even done yet; I have my appointment with the Ausländerbehörde (Foreigner’s Bureau) in a few days to get my medium-term residency permit (Aufenthaltserlaubnis) and foreigner’s ID.  I made the slightly foolish decision not to accept the housing offered by the university and look for something myself while staying in temp accomodations.   The search turned into a crash course in German real estate, which is quite different from renting in the US or Canada, let me tell you.  Even other Europeans apparently find it strange.

Living at about 50% German immersion has certainly forced my high-school German to improve.  Particularly my renting vocabulary.

Anyway, I finally found myself a place in the very heart of Saarbrücken with an excellent, unbeatable view.  When I get around to it, I might post pictures.  Ordered a ton of furniture; probably ill-advised, but I got tired of living completely like a student.  Even then, I mostly got the cheap stuff that will be easy to get rid of, since this is just a postdoc job.  So I have to go through much of the paperwork all over again to change my address with the city resident register—this is rather alien to people from English-speaking countries, the idea that the government has proof-positive of your whereabouts, and no, this is for all residents, not just foreigners—change my address with the bank, and so on.

So as for Saarbrücken itself, it offers a pretty high standard of living, and is not very expensive to live in.  Rents are less than half of what one finds in Washington DC.  It’s a city of about 200,000, but it serves a much larger metropolitan region, as well as being the main metropolitan centre for all of the Saarland, a good chunk of the Palatinate (the Pfalz in Rheinland-Pfalz), and a big chunk of Lorraine.  I have so far managed to make day trips to places in the Saarland and Lorraine; the farthest I’ve gone in Trier, which is well worth visiting.  I shall be back.

Now y’all are probably wondering what I’m doing at work, aside from filling out forms.  That, I will get to in the next post, if I have time to post it.  Unfortunately, with no permanent address, getting a stable Internet connection has been a challenge, and I’m blogging from work (and it’s pretty late here).