When I was an exchange student sometime in the past century in Germany, I discovered a secret to learning German. I mean, besides the crushing loneliness and hours of boredom.
Before I arrived I had taken two years of middle school German (shout out to my fellow malcontents in Ms. Cathcart’s German class at Laredo Middle School) and one year and some change of high school German. In modern lingo, this equates to about one Youtube beginning German course or an hour on Duolingo.
My German wasn’t great.
After landing in-country, I discovered that, when actual Germans spoke German, I couldn’t tell where one word ended and the next began. It was a lot different than just some voice in cheap headphones in Smoky Hill High School’s language lab. And when I could tell the words apart, I would write down the words I didn’t understand. Often they were names. Silke, Thilo, Sebastian and Thörsten were all new to me.
I actually looked them up in a dictionary. Really.
But then, in a cupboard in the room I was staying in, I found a stack of comics. “Asterix und Obelix” was scrawled across the front. When I began reading, I discovered the comics were slightly goofy but somehow funny and, anyway, I had to bridge the time between dinner and falling asleep somehow.
I know all the comic nerds out there are freaking out about how Asterix and Obelix comics aren’t German. I know, Besserwisser (know-it-alls). But at the time, I didn’t need to learn French and they were all in German. And, as a foreigner, you often mistakenly see the country you’re currently in as an item’s country-of-origin. I made the same mistake with Nutella and the world does it with that Adolf guy.
But every night for a month or so, I cranked up the Simple Minds on my Walkman and got to work. The formula made the learning easy: The Romans were bad, the Gauls good. And Asterix was fat, lovable and didn’t know his own strength. Obelix was the brains. Or was it Asterix that was fat and Obelix was the brain?
It didn’t really matter.
Learning German
The comics were perfect because they presented me simple German sentences in a childish context. Too much of the German being thrown at me at the time was too high-brow. Reading a newspaper didn’t help because I barely knew who Kohl was let alone Genscher, Honecker or Herbert Grönemeyer. And books weren’t any better. It just confused me.
Asterix and Obelix was just the ticket.
Plus they gave me a cultural hook for starting conversations with Germans.
“Ja, Asterix und Obelix sind schon geil (Yes, Asterix and Obelix are great),” Mark Bonitz said to me on the smoker’s patio, helping me learn German slang. “Probier es mal damit (Try this),” he said, handing me a thick Donald Duck comic. Though I could never get into the Donald Ducks.
Thilo in Leistungskurs Chemie (Advanced Chemistry) was a little different.
“Ja, Asterix und Obelix. Habe ich auch gelesen (I read Asterix and Obelix too),” he said. “… in der dritten Klasse (… in third grade).”
I learned a valuable lesson from Thilo that day too. That it was better to spend time on the smoker’s patio even though I didn’t smoke.
Kann es sein, dass Thilo der Vollpfosten ist? The full post, that Thilo
I’m still scarred by him. Though I was looking at stayfriends today and I think he might have been Timo. Timo the full post.
[…] we just go home?” I thought. I wanted to go back to reading Asterix and Obelix in my room rather than sweat through more small talk in my emerging […]
I was introduced to Asterix and Obelix on my first visit to Germany at age 11. I was meeting most of my German relatives for the first time. My immigrant parents had left Germany 15 years earlier. They had spoken only English at home, figuring they might never see Germany again, and that they’d better raise their kids as American as possible. That was 52 years ago! At first, I had to translate every word I read with my Langenscheit’s German / English dictionary at my side. Gradually, I had to look up fewer and fewer words. As an adult, I eventually ended up living in Germany for 14 years, and still go back regularly for visits. I have collected and loved the Asterix and Obelix comics for all those years, and will never tire of them!
Just like my experience! I felt kinda ridiculous reading comics with a dictionary…
I read them in French when l was a child, and now at 50 l’m reading them in German along with a dictionary and enjoying them just as much, if not more.