Recently here in Germany I joined a basketball “Sportverein.” A “Sportverein” is like a club, but it’s a little more serious than that. If you are a member of a “Sportverein,” you are expected to practice your sport with your team two times during the workweek and play in matches on weekends.
Among the many challenges that this new endeavor has presented me with is the language. The practices are two hours long and the practices are in German. The difficulty that I have with the language varies in degrees: sometimes I’m better at it, other times not.
Yesterday, for example, before practice began, the other players and I stood in a circle around the coach at half court and listened to him speak. These little pre-practice, half-court meetings, I’ve come to learn, are something of a ritual. The coach uses them to discuss housekeeping matters and to address any concerns we might have. However, yesterday after the housekeeping matters had been discussed, the coach decided to use the rest of the time there at half-court to do a team-building exercise. He wanted us to go around the circle completing the following sentence: “Man kann mir vertrauen, weil...” (“I can be counted on, because...)
The player to the coach’s left started, “Man kann mir vertrauen, weil...”
Honestly, I didn’t hear why. I was too busy trying to figure out if I had understood the exercise correctly. Only one other person stood between the player who had just begun speaking and me, so I wanted to make sure I had everything straight.
The next player went, “Man kann...”
Again, I didn’t really listen because I was too busy saying to myself, Ah, OK, so we’re completing the sentence. Ah, it’s like that kind of an exercise. I knew the vocabulary: I knew what “vertrauen” meant -- it meant “trust,” so that was good.
It was my turn to go. Though by then I had thought I understood the exercise, my expression must have said something different because the coach started re-explaining it. Which was fine because he was explaining it in German, and I thought that I seemed more competent before the other guys, receiving the instructions in German. I nodded my head to show my understanding and had thought that everything was copacetic. But then for some reason, he decided to switch into English.
Oh, no, I thought. Now I look like I’m the American guy who needs extra help. I continued to nod my head and when the coach stopped speaking, I duly completed the sentence "I can be counted on because..."
“...weil ich wirklich ein team Player.”
I thought it was a good answer, but the moment after I gave it, I realized I had made an error: I had forgotten the verb.
See, in German, there are some situations when the verb of a sentence should be shoved to the end of it. For example, in the sentence, “Ich mag Eis, weil es so gut schmeckt,” the verb “schmeckt” (to taste) must pushed to the end of the sentence. Word for word, such a sentence would read like this in English: “I like ice-cream because it so good tastes.”
In my sentence, I had wanted to say that I could be counted on because I am a good team player. However, probably because the construction I was using required that verb to be pushed to the end of the sentence, I forgot the verb.
What I wound up saying was, “You can trust me because I really a team player.”
Honestly, my oversight was no big deal. Still, to me, I felt that it proved that I was not fully competent, at least in German. Nevertheless, the guys kept going around the circle answering, many of them with interesting answers, and the practice wound up going well.
I didn’t think too much about my language slip-up until this morning when I was on the train going to work. In my mind’s eye, I recreated that circle of players and I played over my answer. But instead of thinking about my fuck-up, I thought about what I had actually said, the content. “You can trust me because I’m really a team player. You can trust me because I’m really a team player.”
“Hmm...” I thought. “That’s actually pretty good.”
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