My German comprehension is okay. Certainly not complete, but with context and body language and a bit of work, I can usually make out the topic of conversation and if it is simple and familiar, follow along pretty well. My speaking, however, lags behind my comprehension, waiting for some world where I won't mind loosing my personality and polish behind a cobbled together string of badly pronounced words in a time and gender crunching mix. So on my latest trip to Germany, as usual I smiled and nodded, getting by with a "Danke" or a softly spoken sentence here and there. When people realize I don't speak German, they smile an apology and avoid future attempts at conversation, or switch to English.
Until Joshua. He is the three-and-a-half-year-old son of my German friends Melanie and Bernhard, and he had been looking forward to the arrival of "Julie" without any thought of what language he would use to converse with me. He spoke in German, looking me in the eye and expecting a response. Even when my response was a confused look, or a grammatically garbled sentence blending German and English, he did not bat an eye or back off. He did not curtail our conversations or switch to English; he just plowed ahead, as three-year-olds do, his vocabulary simple and to the point.
Some mornings he came to my room to visit; alone together we would piece together communication out of body language and our growing understanding of the German language. I showed him pictures of my dad and brother's bees; he responded eagerly, "Bienen!" and followed with a whole slew of questions I was sure I wouldn't be able to answer even in English. He saw my journal and wanted to color, so he ran up stairs (after telling me, "Bleib da" -- stay there!) to get paper and colored pencils and then scribbled away, drawing ... Kuchen! (Cakes) He slid them into an imaginary oven and when they were done, we ate them.
One night he even wanted me to put him to bed. I read him a story in German (I'm sure it must have sounded awkward, but he listened attentively and made no comment), prayed for him in German, understood when he was asking for a last tuck-in from Mama.
Since Joshua is not the first three-year-old I have spent time with, I recognized some of his habits as those common to little boys everywhere. His constant, "Warum?" after every instruction or explanation his mother gave was not hard to translate; he is in the "why?" phase. When we took a trip into the Black Forest that required an hour in the car, he peppered the way with familiar road trip questions: "Sind wir da? Sind wir da?" (Are we there?) "Wo ist die Schwarzwald? Wo? Da?" (Where is the Black Forest? Where? Here?)
Repetition was also in my favor. One afternoon when we were working in the garden, he went back and forth between the beds where Melanie and I were working. "Findest du eine Nacktschnecke?" he would ask first one, then the other, over and over again. It was easy to understand that he wanted any slugs we might find. (Why he wanted them was not so clear to me.)
I also gave him a few English lessons. Sometimes he would point to objects and I would give him the English name; when he was busy counting everything in German I would follow his lead in English. Occasionally he would try to repeat me. "Pig" was one word that stuck; "pinkg, pinkg, pinkg" he would say, pointing to pictures of pigs. But when I told him the word "peacock," he told me in no uncertain terms, "You may not say 'peacock.' You can say 'pig,' but you cannot say 'peacock.'"
We laughed together, too, and made up imaginary games, and shared piggy back rides. And when I would make a foray into the unknown world of German, and he would
respond with an action or a laugh or an appropriate answer or a knowing
look, he gave me the gift of being understood.
He asked several times where my car was, wondering how a visitor could arrive at their home sans auto. A Flugzeug was a cool way to have traveled, but he couldn't see the airplane in their driveway, either. Maybe sometime he can travel ganz ganz weit across the ocean in a big airplane and come to give me my next German lesson!
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