On Bad English, Proper Babbling, and the Art of Understanding One Another

My English is bad. I know this because I’ve been told so several times. Oddly enough, mostly by people I was speaking German with. The English and Americans I’ve actually had conversations with seemed considerably less concerned. Apparently, they didn’t have time to give my grammatical shortcomings the attention they deserved. They were too busy talking to me.

I learned English at school. There were rules, tenses, irregular verbs, and the comforting certainty that every question had a correct answer. Or at least one the teacher wanted to hear. Later, I met American soldiers in pubs around Giessen. They brought with them a kind of English that had never found its way into my textbooks. Words were shortened, syllables swallowed, and expressions used that I’d never heard before.

Yet somehow we managed to talk to one another without anyone first checking whether our conversations were grammatically permissible.

This didn’t exactly help my sense of linguistic correctness. Eventually, I could no longer tell whether a sentence was grammatically sound or whether I was using some colloquial construction that my English teacher would have greeted with a red pen and an expression of profound disappointment.

When Tanja wanted to visit her father in America, I told her that I thought it was absolutely right and important for her to do so. She should visit her father. But what on earth was I supposed to do in America for three weeks? I couldn’t even speak proper English.

I believed that. I really did.

There was another reason for my reservations, though. Because of my social anxiety, many conversations in my life had never taken place. Not because I had nothing to say or wasn’t interested in other people, but because fear had sometimes been stronger than my desire to talk to them.

And now I was supposed to spend three weeks in a country whose language, as far as I was concerned, I couldn’t even speak properly.

We went anyway.

In Pennsylvania, we stayed in a camper on Donna and Dwight’s farm. Every morning, I went into the house. The people there were friendly and welcoming. Walking past them without a word would have struck me as terribly rude. So I said whatever came to mind:

„Good morning. A wonderful day in Pennsylvania!“

It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated piece of English, nor was it a revelation the world had been waiting for. But it was meant kindly, and apparently that was enough. We started talking.

Naturally, there were words I didn’t know. Sometimes I looked up a translation on my phone; sometimes I tried to express a thought differently. And occasionally, after a lively conversation, we discovered that we’d been talking about entirely different things.

Everyone had understood something. Just not the same thing.

So we cleared up the misunderstanding and carried on talking. Nobody demanded that I improve my grammar before continuing. And nobody seemed particularly interested in giving me a grade for my linguistic efforts.

At first, I still felt compelled to warn people that my English wasn’t particularly good. Whether that was typically German or just typically me, I couldn’t say. In any case, I apparently felt obliged to give people advance notice of the linguistic ordeal they were about to endure.

Their reactions were remarkable. More than once, I was assured that my English was better than that of many other people. Whether that was actually true, I have no idea. It could have been simple politeness. But at least it was friendly politeness, intended to encourage me and make it clear that the conversation was welcome.

At one point, Tanja’s father asked why I hadn’t wanted to come to America in the first place. Tanja had told him about my reservations.

I explained. What was I supposed to do for three weeks in a country whose language I couldn’t even speak properly? That was exactly what I’d been afraid of before the trip, and I’d meant every word of it.

By then, however, I had to admit that I’d been thoroughly mistaken. People were so friendly and open that my English was nowhere near the problem I’d imagined it would be.

Tanja’s father didn’t make a big deal of it.

„Your English is much better than our German.“

And whenever I became uncertain again, he had another answer:

„Don’t be shy.“

That was all it took. He wanted to talk to me. And I wanted to talk to him.

During those three weeks, I spent a surprising amount of time thinking about words and languages. Not just because I occasionally couldn’t remember an English word. I also discovered that other languages could help me find it.

Sometimes I knew an Italian or Spanish word that came close to what I wanted to say. Sometimes a German expression helped. And sometimes I found myself mentally jumping back and forth between languages until the English word I was looking for finally appeared.

This could even happen in the middle of a conversation.

„I can’t remember the English word. In Italian, you’d say something like affrettarsi, in Polish pospieszyć się, in German sich beeilen …“

And while I was still explaining what I was trying to say, there it was:

„Hurry up!“

So a linguistic difficulty sometimes turned into a conversation about language itself. I didn’t have to remain silent until the right word came to me. I could let other people join me in looking for it.

I’d experienced languages helping one another along before, incidentally. Of all places, in French class.

At evening school, I had a French teacher named Dr. Brütting, whom I liked very much. He always made a real effort to make his lessons interesting. Unfortunately, those efforts encountered my French skills, which to this day are better suited to entertaining French speakers than to communicating with them.

Once, he asked me to say the French word for five. I didn’t know it. So I glanced at the bottom of the textbook page, where the page numbers were also written out in words.

Cinq.

That looked familiar. Five in Italian is cinque. So I pronounced the French word with such Italian enthusiasm that its French pronunciation suffered rather badly.

Dr. Brütting laughed kindly. He wasn’t just a French teacher; he was also an enthusiast of all things Italian. He had understood exactly how my mind had arrived at that answer.

Of course, my pronunciation was wrong. But I’d recognised something that was right: the relationship between the two words.

And so a mistake became not a reason for embarrassment, but a moment of shared enjoyment.

Incidentally, Dr. Brütting also introduced me to The Little Prince. In French class, I learned that it was a wonderful book and that I urgently needed to get myself a copy in German. It didn’t do much for my French. But it didn’t do the book any harm either.

Back in Pennsylvania, I discovered that the English spoken by the people there didn’t always have much in common with the English in my schoolbooks. I was told that when some locals really got going, even other Americans had trouble understanding everything they said.

That sounded familiar.

I’m from Hesse.

We have a language that occasionally bears a passing resemblance to Standard German but refuses to let that resemblance impose unnecessary restrictions. We babbel. We say „Guhde“, ask „Wäy gitt dirs dann?“ and use expressions that sometimes make people from other parts of Germany look as though we’ve just presented them with a mathematical equation in an extinct language.

Yet somehow it works remarkably well.

Nobody has to consult the dictionary before talking to their neighbour. And if someone from elsewhere doesn’t understand something, we explain it. In Standard German, if necessary. Assuming it’s really necessary.

In Pennsylvania, someone even told me that my English sounded a little Amish. I found that fascinating. A Hessian crosses the Atlantic, does his best to speak English, and ends up being told that his accent bears a resemblance to a linguistic tradition that, in a roundabout way, leads back towards his German roots.

Given Pennsylvania’s German-speaking history, that was quite a delightful twist. Apparently, I’d crossed the Atlantic only to find myself linguistically a little closer to home.

But that was no reason to keep my mouth shut.

Incidentally, I don’t pronounce the English „th“ particularly convincingly either. Native speakers have pointed this out to me several times. I’ve tried positioning my tongue exactly where it’s supposed to go, occasionally producing something that sounded more like a medical emergency than a demonstration of polished English pronunciation. The result still frequently comes out sounding like „w“ or „ff“.

So be it.

As long as the person I’m talking to understands what I mean, I see no reason to abandon the conversation. And if there’s a misunderstanding, we can ask questions. A remarkably useful invention, which, astonishingly enough, even people with perfect pronunciation occasionally need.

Sometimes your own pronunciation even becomes a joke. „Love, Laugh, Live“ turns into „Loff, Laff, Liff“.

My stepfather, for example, likes to call AC/DC „Atze Datze“. I know immediately which band he means. And the joke would be lost if he suddenly started pronouncing the name in proper English.

Language doesn’t stay alive by having every mistake constantly examined.

Grammar is part of language too, of course. It isn’t unimportant. It helps us express our thoughts precisely and avoid misunderstandings. The problem begins when the desire to say something correctly turns into the fear of saying anything at all.

At school, an incorrectly constructed sentence gets marked in red; the wrong tense costs you points. That’s part of learning. But there are teachers like Dr. Brütting, who can recognise a discovery even behind a mistake.

And then there are people who apparently feel called upon to judge other people’s language skills despite never having taken part in the conversations concerned.

I’ve been told back home that my English is so bad it simply won’t do.

In America, it did.

In fact, it worked remarkably well. I had wonderful conversations, met people, heard stories, asked questions, laughed, and learned things that would have remained unknown to me without those exchanges.

I made grammatical mistakes along the way. Quite a few, no doubt.

But I also did something right: I talked to people.

Children learn to speak by speaking. Not by memorising every rule first and then applying to the relevant authorities for permission to utter their first complete sentence.

At some point, some of us seem to lose sight of this simple fact. We learn to be ashamed of mistakes and begin to prefer silence to saying something wrong. Yet it’s perfectly possible to construct grammatically flawless sentences in your native language without communicating a single meaningful thing to the person you’re talking to.

Conversely, two people with limited knowledge of each other’s language can communicate an extraordinary amount, provided both are willing to make the effort.

Speaking a foreign language makes you vulnerable to a certain extent. You risk sounding awkward, searching for words, or accidentally saying something entirely different from what you intended.

But you also show the other person that they’re worth the effort.

I’m glad I went into Donna and Dwight’s house every morning in Pennsylvania and greeted them. That I didn’t wait until I could think of some particularly elegant expression. That I didn’t let the fear of making mistakes keep me silent.

Because a simple „Good morning“ led to conversations, encounters, and memories I wouldn’t want to be without.

If I’d travelled to America with perfect English, I would probably have understood some things more quickly, expressed myself more elegantly, and spent less time searching for words.

But I probably wouldn’t have half as much to tell today.

So many conversations in my life had never happened because of my anxiety. And yet, in the very place where I’d expected the greatest difficulties, so many new conversations took place.

My English still isn’t perfect. But I can speak considerably better English than most Americans can speak Hessian. And somehow, we understood one another wonderfully.

There’s no reason to be ashamed. But every reason to talk to one another.

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