Gregor the Polish Newspaper Salesman

So every day, I either walk home after school (30-35 minutes) or I take the U-Bahn (subway; 10-12 minutes). If I take the U-Bahn, I have to change lines once. This involves a 1-2 minute walk through an underground tunnel walkway. Every day, a man is there peddling the Berliner Zeitung, one of the major newspapers here. He is very aggressive in his sales technique, and has gotten in my face more than once. His name is Gregor.

Finally I decided to humor the fellow... After all, I have no problem talking with strangers. I spent about a half hour talking to him last Friday. The conversation took place in German, but I could tell by his accent that he was not German. I asked him where he was from, and he told me that he came from Poland. Having also detected the non-German twist in my accent, he began to try to talk to me with broken English. I told him that I could understand German too, and he seemed relieved as he is far more comfortable with German.

So, after exchanging some small talk, he began to inquire about some of the strange nuances of the English language. [I have told this story a few times already, but it never gets old.] He got out a pen and wrote out three phrases on one of his newspapers.

"Look out"
"Look up"
"Stand down"

I had to explain to him that to "look out" had both an objective and subjective meaning. One can look out the window, or look out for danger/suspicious individuals. Likewise, one can look up at the ceiling, or "look up to their grandfather as a role model." He really liked that one. The hardest to explain was to "stand down," which he assumed meant something like kneeling or sitting down. I had to explain it using a metaphor involving the military or police and how a person of authority would theoretically tell his subordinates to "stand down" and halt their impending action. He kept asking me, "Why?" and I had no answer for him.

All of this was conducted in German, which led me to chuckle a bit as I walked away with a gratis copy of the paper as my reward for the mini English lesson. An American explaining a few complexities of the English language, in German, to a Polish man selling newspapers in a subway station.

I guess the whole experience made me realize how absurdly complicated languages are, especially English, and how I guess I'm glad to have that as my first language.

Speaking of language, I had a five hour long Prüfung (test) today, from 9:00am to 2:00pm. It was the first time that I'd had such a long test since the SATs, I think. The test consisted of the listening, reading and writing comprehension to the C1 level of German (C2 being the highest of 6 levels from A1-C2*). Tomorrow I have to do the speaking section, which is only 45 minutes altogether. But I'm not worried about tomorrow. Today was the real deal. I cannot say if I "passed" or not, but I'll find out on Friday. Honestly, it does not really matter all that much. Especially compared to the all-important TestDaF on April 22nd to determine my eligibility for University study here. Still, I'd prefer to pass it. This is my 8th, and final, week of C1 class at the d.i.d. institut. I'm actually going to miss it a lot. But, I'll be back in less than a month, for the TestDaF prep course.

[* I wanted to comment on how interesting it is to me how countries organize their proficiency-levels. Billy was recently writing about the language levels in Japan (1-5?), and I wanted to take this opportunity to see if he'd be willing to further elaborate on these levels, either here or in his own blog.]

I have been wanting to update this more regularly, and often come up with ideas of things to write about... But I always end up scrapping the ideas. I haven't decided exactly which direction I want this blog to go in. Some people handle their blogs like diaries, updating daily (or more than once a day) with details of all the trivium of their everyday lives. (i.e. "today i woke up and brushed my teeth and then went to school/work and then met up with my friend so we could go shopping for shoes," etc.) Not that there is anything wrong with that. One of my favorite things about the Internet is the freedom of speech it provides. (Unless you are in an oppressive country like Myanmar, where the regime simply unplugs themselves from the Internet when the monks/students start protesting not just on the streets, but online.)

Or some people write primarily about how they've been feeling... using the blog as a direct conduit to tell their audience about their emotional/personal ups and downs. There is nothing wrong with this either, in my opinion. It's just that... personally, I sometimes struggle with the idea of publishing my emotional struggles on such an accessible forum. I mean, hell, my Facebook page links directly here. And everyone knows that just because I have 200+ Facebook "friends," doesn't mean they are all "real" friends... or at least not people I'd want reading super personal things about myself. I guess there is an intrinsic degree of exhibitionism in ANY blog... but still.