Words not to live by...

I doubt that I know ten verbs in German even though I took two years of German in high school. I am certain, however, that one verb I’ll never forget is…wait for it….”crochet”.   “Crochet” sits permamently in my mental hard drive because it became one of my fighting words. By fighting words, I mean arguing words. By arguing words, I mean I would consistently [ahem] needle our teacher about the practicality of quizzing us on vocabulary that wasn’t even close to useful.  

As you can imagine, our teacher was a next-pager following the theme of the unit.  Naturally, we were [ahem #2] knit-deep in the clothing unit, the one where you get to learn the words for sock, shirt, shoes, hat, tie, and pants, plus some random rarely worn items.  Well, das Buch in my German class got a little more specific for whatever reason.  Maybe the editors were in the pocket of Big Sewing.  One of those juicy words was “häkeln”.  (The two-dot thingy, an umlaut, makes the “a” sound more like a short “e”, or a slightly tighter mouth shape just north of an open-mid front unrounded vowel.)

I’ve always been good at memorizing things, so any class that involved non-math notes and lists was generally pretty easy for me. Definitely very short-term memory, but a useful school skill nonetheless.  In fact, I can still see where the word “crochet” was on the clothing vocabulary list page.   Soon it would appear on our unit test, and for comic effect I would feign incredulity at the ridiculousness of being tested on it, but the sentiment was sincere.  Our teacher would smile and tolerate me and ask me why I was complaining because I was already getting an A in the class.   He didn’t budge, and I didn’t budge him.   So if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?  To embrace the inanity of it all, a classmate of mine and I would simulate arriving in Germany and practice using our newly learned language skills.  One of us would say to the other something like,  “Ich gehe in die Stadt.” (“I go in the city.”)  And the other person would respond,  “Häkelst du?”  (Do you crochet?)  Basically after any first sentence or greeting, the other person would ask “Häkelst du?”  Still fun to this day.

English is so widely spoken in Germany that I’m sure I’ll never need to know German, but let me tell you, if I ever got stuck and no one had a phone to translate, I feel 100% confident I can find out whether the other person crochets or not.  I hope they would answer with either  “Ja” (yes) or “Nein” (no) because I also managed to retain those words. But if they responded with the much more probable third option, which would be some variation of WTF?, fortunately I’d understand that as well since I’m pretty sure it bears a universal facial expression.   

Mine was "häkeln". What’s an impractical word or phrase you learned early on in another language that has stuck with you until now?