Preparation be damned! (and my fully justified fear of that Vandersexx scene in Eurotrip)
With four days until departure, and a week of traveling ahead, the most German I can manage before my arrival in Frankfurt is to memorize a few basic phrases. Ja, Nein, and Wo ist die nächste Kneipe? (Where is the next pub?) ranked high on the list, so I’ve got the important things down. Between now and then I’ll be so busy packing, driving, flying, visiting family, and slogging through security checkpoints that learning more German seems a distant concern.
All the same, I figured I could read on the plane, so I scoured a half dozen bookstores for a pocket reference guide for German phrases. They typically had several sizes of dictionary and nothing else. I was hoping for a handy and amusing book, something like Common German Insults and Pickup Lines, with which I can anger the men and woo the women. My antics with such a guide would all be forgiven, of course, because I’ll massacre the delivery, but there are no limits for good entertainment. Publishers take note. Need I point out the vast untapped profits (and laughs) ripe for the picking in such a market?
When I finally found a common phrase book, it was priced at twenty dollars, so I figured I’d save cash and not make a fool of myself, at least not at first. I’ll just pretend I’m mute instead. Nod and smile, or hope to god they speak English. If things gets out of hand, and my safety depends on recalling on cue that thirty letter safe word, and the metal chair they handcuffed me to is bolted to the floor, I’ll have to rely on my survival skills and the panic-induced strength that surges through my limbs when confronted by whip- and chain-weilding leather-clad vixens.
Once I got home from the bookstore, however, that thought began to worry me, so I dug around for a while and found a few websites to help me out. I bookmarked a basic German course on Wikibooks, the Google translator, and the jackpot of all reference pages for German (discovered after wading extensively through ads and other Internet muck). If you prefer video lessons YouTube has some decent ones, too, and it helps just to familiarize yourself with the sounds.
These resources will be more useful as a reference guide once I’ve been exposed to the language than they are right now, but anyone with considerable motivation and persistence could conceivably learn German without spending a cent beyond access to the Internet.
When I get to Frankfurt, I’ll do my best not to agree with anything I don’t fully understand, especially when it’s offered by a woman in tight leather. And if I don’t heed my own advice, at least it’ll be a good story. Otherwise I’m just going to jump right in. Klingt Spaß, ja?