Language Lesson

On a bus downtown, I was drawn out of the usual retreat into my own earphones (a necessary defense mechanism, I've finally learned, against too much noise and city crowds) by the sound of two young tourists of indeterminate origin chatting with two older Germans.

One young man started telling the German couple that his language teacher showed him how German verbs are built out of prefixes and roots, and if you know the constituent parts, you can often figure out the meaning of the whole - his example was "ausstellen," which is "to exhibit" and comes from "aus" (out) and "stellen" (to put, place, set). So you put something out, you exhibit it. Then he grinned and said to the native speakers, You never thought of that, did you!

The other tourist guy mentioned the weirdness of French numbers (where 80 is "four twenties" and 90 is "four twenties and ten") and how he'd once pointed that out to a French person who similarly realized they'd never really thought about it that way.

Then everybody was trying out different ways of pronouncing the word "ich," the German couple coaching them, and somebody in the tourist crowd laughed and called out, "German lesson!" Someone else suggested, "Deutsch one-oh-one!"