After reading rraspberry's post on the humorous aspects of a foreign tongue, I thought it might be nice for me to share a story of my learning German the hard way.  My senior year of high school was spent as an exchange student near Düsseldorf Germany, and it was overall a wonderful experience which I would recommend anyone do if they have the chance.  My only problem was that when I arrived in Germany, I couldn’t speak the language at all.  I knew a couple of cuss words, could count to ten, say that I was hungry or thirsty and ask where the bathroom was, but that was the full extent of German education.  After about of month of total immersion in the language, I became fluent in German and as able to enjoy my stay.  But that first few days were a trying experience, full of the frustration of not being understood and not having a clue about what was being discussed around me.

The first evening at my host parents’ house taught me very quickly how much I had to learn about the German tongue.   My host father’s niece and her boyfriend had just returned from a vacation in Belize and had come over to share their pictures and holiday stories with my host parents and to take a look at the Texan that had just arrived to stay for a year.  We sat around in the garden, on a lazy August evening, sipping coffee and enjoying tasty German pastries.  I sat in the lounge chair with my foot propped up, in order to relieve the pounding pain in my ankle, which was tightly wrapped in a plaster cast, due to the ripped tendons that were the result of an accident involving a self proclaimed Wiking Warrior and a game of full contact king of the log, but that is another story for another time.  So any way I sat there like an idiot, only able to comprehend about one out of every two hundred words of the conversation, when my host father got all excited and blurted out “Kuk mal, der Eagle.” (Look, an eagle)  At least it sounded like he said Eagle, but what he really said “Igel” which sounds just like Eagle, but as I found out, it really means something else.

So since I heard a word that I thought that I understood, I start scanning the skies, looking for a large bird of prey.  They of course thought that it was hilarious that I was looking to the skies.  My host father says while flapping his arms like wings “Nicht ein Vogel” (Not a bird).  So I that point I had figured out that they were talking about an “Igel” and not an Eagle, but I still didn’t have a clue what an “Igel” was.  I host father’s niece struggling with her limited English tried to translate for me an “Igel” is the German word for what we call in English a shrub pig or a brush hog.  Now I was even more confused, I had never heard of a shrub pig before and started looking out for the off chance that we were about to be attacked by wild boars, and in Texas at least a brush hog is a mowing implement that is pulled behind a tractor.  

Finally, I saw a little ball of spikes over in the corner of the garden under a privet bush and I figured out what an “Igel” or as they told me in English a “shrub pig” really was.

It was just a little wild Hedge Hog, which lived in our garden and helped out by eating pesky insects and adding a bit of interest by the garden gnomes and fish pond.