Yes, these are highly unavoidable when you are visiting a foreign country and have little to no knowledge of the language or customs. Luckily, the members of the SABINA group were all able to experience their own miscommunications during our first week in Bonn. One of the hardest concepts to grasp in the German language is the rule for identifying the gender of an object. Consequently, one member of the SABINA group had the constant misfortune of identifying himself as woman for the first couple of days. Another person had the misfortune of characterizing a chair as something you use to sit under a knife, instead of at the table. When given a scavenger hunt to complete throughout the city of Bonn, our last item on the agenda was to take a picture with a local German university student. Unfortunately for us, the first couple of people we asked ignored us or ran away, making it difficult to achieve our task, of course, who would want to take a picture with the confused Americans who can barely speak German! Eventually, someone was able to understand our broken English, but not until after we embarrassed ourselves with the process of asking. Additionally, another member of our group miscommunicated when he tried to ask what time a place closed and the girl who worked there began to tell him what time she was getting off work and when she could hang out. To make matters worse, not only have we had problems with the meaning of the German words, but we have had problems with pronouncing them as well. As a result, our thick American accents (which derive from places across the U.S. such as Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California) have inhibited our ability to correctly pronounce the words we are learning. Additionally, these miscommunications extend far beyond just mispronouncing words and confusing their meaning. Many members of the SABINA group have gotten lost in the city, or misread the train system and ended up far from where they meant to be, such as in Siegberg instead of Königswinter which are two cities in the opposite direction of each other. As a result, we’ve ended up in some interesting situations in we’ve had to dig through all the German words we know to get back to where we were supposed to be. Consequently, this has actually just forced us to immerse ourselves in the German language and truly experience studying abroad in Bonn!
