I'm now officially a stereotype - I'm teaching English abroad.  While I never thought that I'd actually be in this position, I'm enjoying teaching much more than I thought, although it's more work than I ever expected.  Around January of last year I wanted to get more involved in the community, so I went down to the language center at the University of Marburg and asked if I could help teach an English class - I thought that my skills as a native speaker would help German students get more practice as well as provide me with a fun activity.  To my surprise, they asked me to send in a CV - which I thought was a bit much for what I wanted to do - and after I sent it in, they offered me a position teaching two courses:  Academic Writing in the Natural Sciences and Intensive English for Human Biologists (basically biomedical research as an undergraduate degree).

At this point I started to get nervous - I've taught scuba diving in the past, but I had no foreign language experience, and my only experience teaching in an academic setting was as a TA for a biochemistry lab section at Pomona College.  When it came to teaching English courses at this level, I had no idea where to begin.  Thankfully, the language center had an extensive library, so I checked a few books out and started to plan my lessons.  Planning lessons was hard - I'd never done it before, but thankfully Erica gave me some great advice (essentially, plan units by the material you plan to cover, not the amount of time you think that they will take) and my first class (the introduction to the Academic Writing Course) went well.  Emboldened by my (admittedly minor) success, I was ready for Intensive English - 5 hours a day for a whole week of Biology, Biochemistry, and Anatomy.  My best resources were TED (amazing and free lectures) and PLoS (great open-access papers) and I hope the students enjoyed the material as much as I did. 

As part of this course I had to give a final exam, which you can find here.   I'm curious to see how the adventurous among those reading this blog fare, so if you feel up to the challenge you can send me your answers and I'll grade it for you. I'm proud to say that most students did very well on it, despite the difficulty of both the subject material and the vocabulary, and I was glad to hear that they felt that they had learned a lot (even if I was a bit overzealous with my homework assignments).  The academic writing course is still ongoing, but if my students agree then I'll try to post some of their best work on the site so that you can see what they're capable of.  All in all, I'm enjoying this experience much more than I thought that I would - except for the time it takes to finish grading. 

One of my goals when I received my Fulbright was to use the year abroad to learn another language.  At first I went for the more exotic languages that Marburg had excellent faculty in, such as Chinese, Arabic, and Russian (very hard to find in the US), but after realizing that a year spent learning these languages would not allow me to come close to even a basic conversational level, I started to look at slightly easier, albeit more practical languages, such as Spanish, French, or Italian.  I was foiled again at this juncture, as none of these courses fit into my work schedule well (why is Monday evening the preferred time to teach a language here?).  Keeping my goal in mind, I scanned through the course catalog and found that my options were Modern Irish - Advanced Intermediate (nope!), Middle High German (dead language), and Dutch. 

I had liked my trip to the Netherlands for a conference earlier this year quite a bit, and while there I realized that I could read Dutch fairly well (embarassingly, at first I thought that it was just very poorly spelled German), but as soon as I heard someone speak it I realized that Dutchman can make what I will describe as unnatural sounds.  I am not alone in this viewpoint - a Dutch radio commentator is semi-famous there for saying that "Dutch is not a language, it's a disease of the throat."

Today marks the end of my first week learning Dutch, and my first impressions are that it is a very weird mixture between English and German - since it is a Low Germanic language (not inferior, just that their country is closer to sea level than "High German", which came from Austria/the Alps).  Pronunciation is at times very close to English and/or German, other times the opposite of how it is spelled.  Thankfully, the spelling, grammar, and word order of all three languages are at least similar, as the following example shows.  Equivalent words (or word groups, if English uses a helping verb) are shown in the same color. 

          What is your name?      English
          Wat is je naam?            Dutch
          Was ist deine Name?     German

However, Dutch is still much more a Germanic language than English, so sentence construction and word order is often closer to German than English, as the following example shows.

          How are you called?     English
          Hoe heet je?                Dutch
          Wie heißt du?               German

While it might be too early to make any bold sweeping claims, I feel confident that I'll be able to learn a fair amount of Dutch in one semester (all of Dutch grammar fits into a nice 80 page book that I found) and I'm enjoying the class a lot so far - the professor is very good and clearly loves her subject.  The weirdest thing is learning a foreign language in a foreign language, but even that seems to be going well so far.  And to counteract the obvious "But when will you ever use this?" charge, there is a chance (however remote) that I will do research next summer in Namibia, where Afrikaans (mutually intelligible with Dutch) is widely spoken.  So there.

This story has been covered elsewhere, including the German version of Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and lots of blogs, so I'm not the first to catch it, but it's still funny.  Three times a year the Max-Planck Society publishes a magazine that summarizes research from all the different MPI's so that the general public gets a good impression of what we do, and so that we can learn what all the other institutes are doing.  The theme of the third German-language issue (and upcoming fourth English-language edition) of this year's magazine was China, so they decided to put "an old Chinese poem" on the cover, taking the image (with that name) from an online database.  Not wanting to offend anyone, they gave it to a senior German sinologist for proofreading, and he gave it the ok.  However, about a week after the magazine appeared, the MPG released a statement which included the wording "... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker"

So what then, does the cover in question say?  A rough translation, provided by language log, follows:

"With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées

KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,

Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,

Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;

Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days."

It's pretty arguable that this meaning was easily accessible to a non-non native speaker, as the image is not an "ancient Chinese poem" but rather a brothel ad from Macau which dates to... you guessed it, present day or turn of the century at the oldest.  You'd think that with all of the international researchers at the Max-Planck Institutes (there are 4 Chinese or Taiwanese researchers in my department alone) they could get this right.  A new cover was released, but I managed to get a copy of the old one. 

And it's probable that this whole incident was just cosmic revenge for this other translation wonder.