Ich lerne die Sprache

Editor's note: This guest blog post does not represent the views of "Ein Jahr in Heidelberg" or any of its executives.

Alex Meyer can speak German. A lot of kids I know claim to be able to speak a second language, but that just means they took, at best, a couple quarters of Spanish in college and maybe watched "Y Tu Mama Tambien" without the subtitles on. They can't really talk, make no effort at an accent, and only really learned enough to pass some competency test. Alex is not like this. He speaks effortlessly and with a preposterously good accent that pervades his entire expression; I could swear that his laugh is German. He knows almost every bit of relevant slang, and never pauses to search for a word. Not one of his friends pities him with English (unless I'm there and they're being polite), they realize that even their prodigious European linguistic prowess is staring at a far greater beast.

Now, you're probably saying to yourself, "Big deal. The guy spent a year in Germany, he BETTER be able to speak the language." To you I say, you've never studied abroad. If you had, you would have learned that most American students, while abroad, are like an acquaintance I knew who spent a quarter in Barcelona: they hang out with other Americans, get drunk every night, and ask for the English menu when they eat out. They come back with 264 photos of them with their three "abroad friends" arm in arm in front of, or deep in the bowels of, various monuments and nightclubs, respectively. His pipe-ness used his time in Germany well.

To me, language is a failsafe test of how considerate a person really is. Learning another language is a fundamentally selfless act: one spends years of his life practicing and learning just so that other people won't be inconvenienced by his native tongue. One learns a language so that he will not be a problem for anyone, so that they won't have to adjust to him. The benefit is that other people will be impressed by your efforts, and their opinion of you usually rises. My friends tend to be the ones like Alex, who make the effort, as opposed to the type to yell at a cab driver for speaking "----ing foreign."

Al has shown me a great time here, and I'll never forget it. His friends, for the most part, are great people. Heidelberg is a town so beautiful that it seems like, 500 years ago, a King walked here and said "this will someday make great post cards." And even with all the German he's learned, Alex is still the greatest. Martin, out.