Mother Tongues and Other Tongues

So Holy Week Burkhard was in Chicago for a conference, then came north to spend the Easter holiday and following week on vacation in Minnesota.

We basically spoke English with each other while he was here. He would graciously say that's because his English needs more practice than my German. I would disagree with that assessment and chalk it up instead to my perfectionist tendencies creating high anxiety about all the grammatical mistakes I know will come out of my mouth if I try to speak auf Deutsch.

Both of us have a similar issue in that we each understand 80-90% of what we hear or read, but trying to actively come up with the right vocabulary and verb conjugations and grammatical constructs as we're speaking on the fly is hard. Especially since neither of us wants to speak "See Spot Run" versions of our non-native language - we each have complex thoughts and we want to express them as fully in other languages as we can in our mother tongue.

Sprachen geht mir schon viel besser, I've noticed, when I'm immersed in the language, like 3 years ago when I was in Dresden for Adri and Burkhard's wedding (btw, Happy Anniversary yous twos!), I was surprised by how much grammer and vocab came back to me, and how quickly my speaking abilities improved, once I got into town.

With that in mind, I've decided I just need to be more intentional about keeping German in my ears on a regular basis, so I've been trolling the internet for irgendetwas auf Deutsch that I could use toward that end. And I found this:



I knew Germans translated and dubbed over American movies, I had no idea they also translated Broadway plays! Some of the wordplay of the English is lost in translation (e.g. the chorus of "For Good" roughly translates "Because we've known each other, I am who I am today," which loses the double-entendre of good in the English verse: "Who can say if I've been changed for the better, but because I knew you I have been changed for good"), but on the whole they get the same meaning across with the same meter and rhyme schemes, in a completely different language. Most impressive.