Hot and Horny

"Sind Sie auch heiß?", I manage in my best German. 

It is a very hot summers day in August, a few weeks after our hang gliding adventures and four weeks into an intensive full immersion German class. I am sitting in a Biergarten indulging in a Weissbier with my German class. All was going well, until I very cleverly decided to put some of my new found German questioning skills to the test by asking the teacher if she was hot too.

"No, Phil you can not say that, it is only for dogs", responds the teacher in German.

"Sorry I don't understand", I reply still in German, wondering what hot dogs have to do with me. We live in Munich not Frankfurt.

"You must ask – is it hot to you too? Not are you hot too. Your first question was very sexual", she explains in German trying to be serious, but having trouble keeping the grin from her face.

Then it dawned on me. Like any good international man of mystery, I'd asked if she was hot as in horny, baby, yeah. 

The German course is actually two courses. Two sets of eight weeks of two hours a night after work, four nights a week learning various ways of asking if an empty seat is available. In spite of feeling continually exhausted after full days at work, I find the vacant chair lessons great. Rote learning German words and sentences are not difficult, but getting the grammar right to say something intelligent or that makes sense, an impossibility for me claims the Frau, is. Whether the Nominativ, Akkusitiv or Dativ form of a word, which correspond, but not by mail, to the subject, direct or indirect objects of an English sentence, is used can totally change the meaning of that sentence. As I learnt in the conversation above.

Later in the year, not content with this first time experience, I feel the urge for further weather conversation as it becomes colder.

"Meine Frau ist immer kalt", I comment to some friends, "aber ich bin immer warm".

The extent of the laughter signals I must have said something wrong, but it is only after having it explained I realise the international man of mystery is not only in residence, but in addition frustrated and wearing a pink triangle. I'd managed to say the Frau is always frigid, while I was always gay. Consequently I've become careful when making small talk about the weather. What might happen if I talk about size, I don’t want to contemplate.

Despite these learning opportunities, what some may refer to as mistakes, I find once the grammar rules are learnt, they are relatively easy to follow. Mostly. Except with irregular verbs, aberrant adverbs, anomalous adjectives, non-conformist nouns, why, because and for many catholic Bavarians who are not into the possession thing. Out of habit, this last lot indirectly exploit the Dativ noun, rather than the Genitiv, a form of possession, which in spite of its ability to make heads spin, is not at all related to the exorcist variety. 

Add three different genders, assorted genders for different words describing the same thing into this grammar mix and you have chaos, at least for those learning the language. Take a simple word like "the" in English, which always has the single, despite many appearances in various personal columns, form "the". In the German Nominativ form "the" becomes der, die, or das depending if the noun is male, female or neuter respectively, which of course they do. In the Akkusitiv, the der becomes den, the die dies not, but rather remains hard as die, while das is just das. It becomes even more complicated with the Dativ, where der becomes dem, die undergoes a sex change to der and das becomes part of the me too generation dem. And let’s not even go near the possessive Genitiv.
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