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By Ben McCarty
News staff writer
June 12, 2010
In high school and college I took a
combined four and a half years of German.
I’m still not quite sure why, but it did
lead to me meeting my fiancée in German 101 my first day of
college. In high school German I think my best friend and I
spent more time trading celebrity jeopardy quotes from Saturday
Night Live than we did sprechen auf Deutsch.
I’m not quite sure what I figured my
German skills would get me, especially in this job; because, you
know Hood
River has such a high Germanic
population and all.
Nonetheless I finally thought I’d get a
chance to use some of my rusty German when
Hood River
soccer player Matthew Dallman returned home for a few days,
bringing along with him three teammates from his Siegen
Sportfreunde soccer club in
Germany.
Yeah, not so much.
I greeted them with a simple “Ich
spreche keine Deutsch, und nicht so gut.”
And that was right about where my German
skills ran out. Dallman brought one teammate from
Scotland, and two others from
Turkey, who were originally
born in Germany.
My German may be great for simple conversational exercises in a
classroom, or perhaps giving simple directions to lost
German/Austrian tourists, but trying to keep up with a couple of
soccer players speaking rapid-fire German was not working so
well.
Thankfully Dallman, who has had to learn
German the immersion way making his living as a footballer in
Europe, could translate some.
You can look for more about Dallman and
his teammates next week in the Hood River News.
They play on a team with at least nine
different nationalities, all of whom speak varying degrees of
German and English.
Then again, that’s not very unusual
these days. Many professional sports locker rooms are like a
model U.N., with players speaking English, French, German,
Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and more; all on the same team.
My rusty German skills failed me, and
coming to Hood River, I probably should have learned Spanish
instead of taking 4.5 years of German, but I still know the most
important phrase in both languages: “Donde es el baño?” and “Wo
ist die toilette, bitte?”
My college degree may be in political
science, but it’s safe to say the United Nations won’t be hiring
me as a translator anytime soon.
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