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It is strange how little words and phrases from languages we learn, or have learnt, stick in the mind. The Christian Brothers in Belfast gave me a first-class education. (I owe them everything; they owe me nothing.) Languages were a huge part of the curriculum at that time. Irish and French were both required to be taken as O-Levels, that is, until we were 16. Spanish, Italian, German and, believe it or not, Latin, were also available. (There was not much Latin used in West Belfast when I was young!)
Being useless at science – are you really sure the sun is at the centre of the solar system, sir? – I went down the language route. I ended up learning Irish well enough to get myself a job with this august publication and German, badly enough, to fail it not once, but twice, at university. (I am nothing if not persistent in my stupidity.)
That is not to say that German and I parted ways. Nein! I can safely say that I have been learning German for as long as I have been learning Irish – over 40 years now. The difference is, of course, that I have the opportunity to read, write, listen to and speak Irish every day. (Yes, I do! So there!)
I do not have the same opportunities to do so in German, hence, the lack of progress and the eternal struggle mit mein cúpla focal. German is my CD language, the new book language, the look-back at the grammar language, the time-to-take-another-course language. It is the language that never actually becomes a language. It is half-spoken, badly pronounced, three-quarters forgotten. It is here and not here. The grammar is there – masculine, feminine, neuter nouns, accusative, dative, genitive ... Der Mann, mit dem Mann und so weiter... In fact, I have been learning German for so long that the dreaded genitive is now going out of use and being replaced by the dative. I reckon that if I keep going at the same pace, I might also outlive the accusative. Unglaublich but fíor!
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The German came unbidden: ' Übung macht den Meister'. Practice makes the master. It is a lovely little phrase, very poetic, a seanfhocal auf Deutsch
I love German. I love the little bits of literature that I still have from reading Heinrich Böll at school, the little lines of poetry from Goethe to Ingeborg Bachmann, the films that I watch (with subtitles) and the little phrases that sometimes pop into my head and light up a moment in life.
One German phrase ran into my head a little while ago when I was visiting an art gallery. There was a new exhibition on, one with works by Michelangelo, Rembrandt and, appropriately enough, by Dürer. I do not know much about art other than I like looking at it. So, there I was staring at the works on the wall while, all around me, art students were standing in front of these masterpieces, pencil and paper in hand, copying, copying, copying. The German came unbidden: "Übung macht den Meister." Practice makes the master. It is a lovely little phrase, very poetic, a seanfhocal auf Deutsch. Übung macht den Meister.
There they were, those student artists, in their late teens and early 20s, rooted before works of art dating from the Renaissance to contemporary times, standing very still, watching, drawing, copying the masters to become masters. Übung macht den Meister.
It is often remarked that young people today do not have the same attention span of previous generations, that they are flighty, disengaged, too taken up with the digital age, selfies and social media. “They don’t pay attention” is a common cry amongst teachers and lecturers, “they don’t work as hard as we did.”
Perhaps that is what drew my attention to these young ones, that absence of noise, the fact that they were engaged in silent work? These students were rooted, quiet, rapt before the paintings. They were not taking photos with their iPhones; they were looking at them with their own eyes.
There were some witless adults with their phones, snapping away, failing to notice what the youngsters knew
And they were drawing – with pencil and paper. Lines were gently scratched onto the page with old-fashioned lead pencils, wetted thumbs were sometimes applied to remove a line, to refashion what had been drawn. They were not snapchatting or whatsapping or facebookinglive or skyping or tweeting. They were present, utterly and totally present, to the task in hand, a task that demanded concentration and, wonderfully, something as old fashioned as pencil and paper.
Of course, not everyone had their power of concentration. There were some witless adults with their phones, snapping away, failing to notice what the youngsters knew – you see more with your own eyes. You could see them move from painting to painting, taking a picture, checking the picture, taking another picture and moving on.
They saw everything and they saw nothing. Übung macht den Meister. True.