Languages

In 3rd grade, a student (do not remember who) did not like the teacher, Mrs. Bucher, and somehow found out that the word for "the books" in German was "die Bücher" which, in a twisted way, was close enough for his purposes.

In about 4th grade, I found my mother's Latin and French books from when she was in school. I tried to learn some Latin and French from the books, but it was just too hard for me to make any progress by myself.

In 7th grade the library was much bigger than in Rheems. I found a book on the history of languages and read and studied it. It was much more interesting than, say, English class. I also found a book on the types and history of musical instruments, which I also read and studied. There were a lot of interesting books in the bigger library.

In Junior High, 7th and 8th grade, we got a half year each of the following (in the order I had them).

Spanish
Reading (did not like that)
French
German

Mr. Bender was a good Spanish teacher and new, I think, at EAHS. There was another teacher that had been there for a while but at some point, so I had heard he was visiting Mexico and had been helping someone along the road and was hit and killed from the collision. But that is only what I had heard.

I enjoyed Spanish and remember many words to this day. There were/are only two genders and one mostly pronounces the words as they are spelled and spells them the way they are pronounced.

I do not remember much of this class and did not really like it - not much use for anything at the time or later. I think it was a filler class since there were four semesters and only three foreign languages available.

French had so many silent letters and I never did figure out how to pronounce words from seeing them - or even getting close. The teacher did little to help in this respect.

JB was a joker and kept trying to get laughs from the class - which was funny but did not help the learning process.

I liked German and already knew some words from reading military history - especially World War I and II.

I liked the way German was pronounced and spelled as knowing one, one could figure out the other. German was harder than Spanish in that it has three genders (instead of two) and at least four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive) each with endings that must be learned.

Mr. Miller was the German teacher. He had a wry sense of humor, in German of course, and would sometimes tell jokes in German.

Speaking about Maxwell House coffee, in reference to their slogan, "good to the last drop", he said something like this, with a wry smile on his face, "und was is Los mit dem letzten Tropf" ("and what is wrong with the last drop").

Mel Wenger's (of Wenger Feeds) daughter had been a German teacher, and stopped by to visit on day. She talked fast but knew her German. I had heard that she was a very good teacher but no longer teaching there.

Of the three, I liked German best, Spanish next, and French the least. That ended up being a good choice as when I got to graduate school in computer science, years later, one needed a scientific language and Spanish would not have counted for that.

Ms. Kurtz was our teacher. She was not that short and not that tall, but the word "kurtz" in German means short or brief. She was a good teacher, but thought I did not talk loud enough as my voice was very quiet.

I think we had a substitute the second part of the second semester. He was not liked but I did well. I remember him saying the following. French was such a nice language but German was much more guttural. To emphasize, he said, in a light effervescent manner with a nice touch of a smile, twirling his fingers, that in French, butterfly is "la papillon", but in German, with a frown, scowl and guttural voice (image someone spitting as they talk) butterfly is "der Schmetterling". Apparently he liked French more than German but needed the work substitute teaching German.

I learned a lot and liked German class.

Ms. Phanenschmidt was the teacher and she did a good job. Some students tried to match-make thinking that she and Mr. Miller, both German teachers, might hit it off together, but that never happened.

It was a pretty small class, about 8 students. I would sit in the back (middle of the classroom but behind the other students). She would ask questions. I rarely put my hand up to answer. When nobody knew the answer, the other students would often turn around and everyone would look at me. I would then usually have the answer.

That is when I started doing what I did through college and graduate school. When the teacher asked a question, I would wait until it was clear that no one knew the answer. Then, if I knew the answer, which I often did, I would put up my hand and answer the question.

Mr. Miller was the teacher for 11th grade German. Some of the girls in the class would flirt with him and appeared to get better grades or scores raised as a result. I never did that, and, although the class was good and I liked German, I decided to take other classes my senior year - such as music theory and matrix/linear algebra.

No German this year.

At West Point, I took 2 years (4 semesters) of German in 3 semesters. Then I took 2 electives in German. The West German faculty person Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Leiberich was very good at teaching German. He had been a forward observer in the field artillery for the German Wehrmacht at Leningrad during World War II,but he never really talked about it. He was talented at drawing cartoons on the blackboard to illustrate vocabulary and concepts we were learning in class.

I was selected as one of 4 cadets studying German to attend and participate in a 3 week exchange program with the West German Officers School the summer of 1976, and a week program in Koblenz with about a dozen cadets studying German. Both were interesting and rewarding.

In the Military and Scientific German course, I did my term paper on (publicly available information on ) EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse).

As with any language, it takes a while to get to the point where one is not translating words but just knowing what is said or read without going though the process of , "now what does that word mean in English".

In graduate school, for a Ph.D. in computer science, we needed to pass a scientific language such as German. But one could not just take the test. Since computer science had funds, some of those funds were used to support language graduate students. After a few lessons, the teacher said I could come when I wanted to and take the test at the end, since I had an advanced knowledge of German.

Near the start, I did ask her the following. If I could produce a English sentence that she could not translate into German, then I would get an A and pass the course. She did not accept but wanted to know the sentence. The sentence was, "This sentence is in English". If you translate it into "Dieses Satz ist auf Englisch", then the sentence is now false since it is no longer in English. But if you translate it into "Dieses Satz ist auf Deutsch" then the sentence is true but is not an accurate translation of the original sentence. This concept is related to many logical paradoxes involving self-reference.

While in graduate school for a Ph.D. in computer science, I worked at the IBM Research Center one summer. During the summer, at the local Baptist Church in Tarrytown, NY, I did private individual study lessons for a one semester course on Bible Greek from a professor/instructor at Nyack College, just across the Hudson River.

For about a year, I would get together with two other professors to read through and talk about the Greek New testament (discussion in English, text in Greek).

Later, I started an intensive study of modern Greek (to go along with Bible and Classical Greek).

After being able to read and listen to modern Greek fairly well, I started an intensive study of modern Russian (to go along with Old Church Slavonic, the predecessor of Russian and other Slavic languages).

Along the way, I like to wade through Gothic (a cross between Old German and Old English), and some Latin and Spanish (to go along with Latin).

The interesting part is how many languages and words are related.

German and English have many linguistic similarities, but this was never really brought out in any of the German classes I had taken. It makes learning and remembering a lot of the words much easier than just memorizing them over time.

So, I always liked languages but never really liked English class very much.