This post was originally published on murderiseverywhere.substack.com.
The Beloved Husband and I are sixty-five year old products of the Singapore education system that we survived and did reasonably well in—meaning, we learned to take exams.
Growing up in multilingual Singapore, we also learned languages: English as the official language, Mandarin as our ‘mother tongue’ and Malay as our ‘National Language’. In my case, English was my home language, given my mother spoke English and Shanghainese and my father spoke English and Malay and a little Tamil. Though, given that my Amah spoke Cantonese, I spoke my first words in Cantonese.
All that’s just background to why, when we decided to learn German, we signed up for the A1 course at the Goethe Institut. In A1.1 and then A1.2 I really enjoyed starting as a total beginner—especially as ‘failure’ wouldn’t be a life sentence (or death sentence) as previous exams had always seemed.
Yesterday we completed our final A1.2 class. The orderly. Singaporean thing would have been to enrol in A1.3 and take the A1 examination at the end of it. According to the outline, most of the A1.3 course, after covering the last two chapters of the textbook, is preparation for the A1 examination.
Except that aren’t learning German to get a certificate we need to apply for a job, a visa or a place at a German university. We realised we want to enjoy learning, not dive back into exam prep!
Unless you grew up in our generation in Singapore you probably won’t get how daring this felt.
Anyway, feeling very daring, we asked whether we could skip the A1.3 course and go straight into A2 instead.
We were told there were rules, there were procedures… our teacher was understanding and encouraging but… Singapore is a country in which educational institutions are subject to administrative or licensing requirements.
In the end, it was agreed we could take the official Goethe Institut placement test in a week, instead of waiting for the next scheduled A1 exam?
Yes! / What have we got ourselves into?
At this point the Beloved Husband did what any Singapore student does when facing an exam. He started preparing.
He bought books:
Lots of books.
Not just books provided by the Goethe-Institut, but textbooks from other schools, publishers and systems.
He compared explanations, studied different grammar explanations, worked through exercises and investigated what the placement test might look like.
I was impressed (plus I love books, even textbooks) but I pointed out that the whole point of our studying German was to get away from Singapore Systematic Studying/ Cramming. Weren’t we studying German to widen our horizons? Can’t we just read and watch German books and magazines and shows and grow our language naturally before taking the placement test?
Then we either move on to A2 or take the A1.3 class and do our best while enjoying our own cultural immersion.
BH agreed. So he also got the German librettos of operas (most of which BH can already sing by heart phonetically) The Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, for example, which sounds to me like a lot of “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha” followed by what I now know are threats to disown her daughter forever… ‘meine tochter nimmermehr’
My own supplementary reading has been less systematic. I’ve been enjoying Japanese manga in German—
This is one of my favourites because who hasn’t dreamt of running a book cafe in a world where you can magically get all the books you want?
I’ve also discovered ‘krimis’—German crime novels. My current favourite (read with a LOT of help) is this book in David Safier’s Angela Merkel (yes, the former Chancellor of Germany) crime solving series, especially because it talks about crime writing and crime writers figuring out writing systems, collaborations and murdering each other on a crime cruise—while even then respecting fair play crime fiction rules.
I’m proud that I got ‘Écureuil Poirot’ the squirrel protagonist of a crime series mentioned. French not German, I know–but still a lovely joke.
It struck home that the book shows Miss Merkel’s husband Achim trying to learn English in retirement by analysing the English pop songs he loved as a boy. He couldn’t learn English in school in the DDR because they taught only Russian.
Which reflected the BH’s attempts to translate Rammstein’s Wo Bist Du and finding it as complex in German as in translation… (either the singer’s suicidal from losing someone or he’s under threat and willing to use the knife in self defence).
I’ve enjoyed our course so far. Our teacher this term is studying Mandarin himself, and can explain terms in Mandarin as well as English, which helps BH and myself more than our fellow students whose other languages are Tagalog, Spanish or Hindi.
And yes, I have a happy ending. After taking the online placement test in German time (middle of the night here) we’ve both been cleared to sign up for A2!
So A2.1 is where we’ll be starting after the two week break that starts tomorrow!
I’m realising the real lesson for me isn’t about German at all. For the first time we challenged the system and didn’t get kicked out of it altogether. In fact, once we made clear (to ourselves and the system) it’s supporting us.
We’ve grown beyond learning the material fed to us, to analysing the learning system and figuring out how it can work for us.
It was drummed into my generation in Singapore (at least in the school system I experienced) that obedience took priority over everything else. Good students listened to the teacher and followed instructions.
And good students completed the syllabus in the correct order, not asking any questions the teacher can’t answer.
I don’t hate the system I grew up in, because it’s got me to this point.
Next term’s not going to be easy and we don’t want to hold back the rest of the class, but I’m actually looking forward to starting a course as the least qualified one in class!