I wasn´t born speaking German - and I don´t remember when I heard the first German words, consciously - yet somehow I have managed to understand some dialects - my favourite one is the language of my home, adoptive city, kölsch. Kölsch is more than just a beer and ten funny commandents for practical life. It is a beautiful language, not only a dialect, it is German in a first state of fermentation, it is a language before Hochdeutsch, it is the language of my elderly neighbours, it is the language of some of my friends´s parents - they can´t talk to me in another tongue, even though they try as they know I was born and raised somewhere else, that my linguistic self is another - and still, I have managed to understand kölsch very well, I can laugh at jokes in kölsch, I can taste its beautiful nasal L and its gutural R, and the way the J is pronounced, like skating shoes moving across an ice field. My neighbours from Berlin - around my age- asked me recently how do I manage to communicate with old Frau XY - "you have to listen carefully, and use your common sense to understand the context - plus pay attention to phonemes". That was my simple answer. Yet it seems too complicated for many to perform such a basic task as LISTENING. But I do listen. I want to listen. Zuhören.
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