Yesterday, Rubén, my Spanish housemate from a small village called Lodosa, gave me a lift home. This isn’t extraordinary in itself though the whole driving experience is quite… interesting. The man drives a relic: a Fiat Cinquecento, the second-generation model methinks.
His car, for instance, randomly brakes, swerves around the curves as if it were a RallyGP car, and generally spices up your day after a lulling day in the office.
So yesterday, on our way back from the office, Ruben tells me he’s got a German lesson at Suffolk College and is running a bit late. If he were to drop me off at home, he would most certainly be late and perhaps the small detour would prove too burdensome for his wailing 4-wheeled contraption. No ifs no buts: there I was suddenly promoted to student of a third-year post-GCSE conversational German class. Ach! Aba ich spreche keine Deutsche…
Ruben was no newbie by all means. He had dipped in Goethe’s language over and over again, back in Spain, and also in the Lande. Although he claimed only to have a rough master of German, his understanding of the teacher’s discourse was flawless whilst it all seemed Greek to me.
To make matters worse, German is full of booby traps. You’d think hat in German would translate to hat in English ( and as the teacher read out such sentences containing the hat word, I was dreamily thinking of bowler hats, sombreros, and caps…). Oh but no, que nenni! Hat is in fact the third singular form of the verb to have. Had I only known…