My Life and Thoughts

Well, I finally got sick of feeling guilty for not knowing German. So, for the past month, I have been studying this interesting language over the internet. I’m using the Rosetta Stone program, which is ironically named because it uses no translations at all, just a large collection of stock photos, which you have to match up with German phrases.

Here is why Rosetta Stone is so great: not only am I learning the language of such worthy cultural institutions as Suhrkamp Verlag, the Berlin Biennale, and Krautgarden; I’m also exploring my own cultural biases.

If you will accompany me on a nostalgic detour into my youth: back in college, when I used to study linguistics, I remember learning about some scientists who had decided to make a semantic network based on the concept “bird.” So, they got some “experimental subjects,” showed them various pictures of animals, and asked them to press a button if the pictured animal was a bird. Birds that were the easiest (fastest) to identify—robins, as it turns out—were then placed at the center of the network, with “less birdlike” birds—owls, bald eagles, ostriches, chickens—radiating outwards according to their decreasing birdlikeness.

Here is what our professor was really upset about: the inability of this network to accommodate the entity of Big Bird. Apparently, if you show people a picture of Big Bird and ask them if it’s a bird, they get really confused, and even say “yes”—notwithstanding the fact that, as the aforementioned professor repeatedly assured us: “Big Bird is not a bird.”

Well, during my recent German studies, I experienced a somehow similar, only more embarrassing, problem. There is one exercise where they show you four pictures: a man in a business suit, a woman in Japanese traditional dress, some children in baseball uniforms, and a genre scene representing African tribal life; you then have to choose the picture corresponding to the word “Männer.”

When my first choice—the man in the suit—was wrong, it took me like half a minute to realize that (a) “Männer” is the plural of “Mann,” and (b) the correct answer was actually the African tribal scene:

I was really horrified that I didn’t recognize these guys right away as “men.” I think I had even been conceptualizing them as some kind of tents. I can only comfort myself by reflecting that it is a sad part of the Eurocentricity of American English (rather than a sad part of me, personally) that “wears feathers” isn’t near the center of the semantic network for “man.”

* * *

To show that there is more to Rosetta Stone than thorny ontological issues and the classification of human “types,” I will leave you with two of my favorite, more sort of neutral and carefree, illustrations.

First, in the lesson on “can” and “cannot”:

I draw your attention particularly to the non-driving dog, whose foolish, good-humored expression I intend to emulate for the duration of my German travels.

Second, in the lesson on present perfect, there is this very encouraging illustration of the sentence, “You have written a book!”:

Evidently, the production of this book comes as a complete surprise to its author. No doubt this happens quite frequently with Germans: you spend a year or two writing emails, doing laundry, reading undergraduate papers, etc.; and then, when you least expect it…

Tags: birds, comparative literature, Germany

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.