"But Your German is So Good!"

Because I'm not taking a German language class here, my learning feels more haphazard. I hear many of the mistakes I make (mostly in terms of gendered articles and their corresponding adjective endings), but I'm sure there are plenty of others that pass by unnoticed. I'm taking more risks linguistically, in terms of guessing the noun forms of verbs I know, for example, which is good, but without instruction, I have no way of making my guesses more educated.

And then, of course, there's my accent. I've gotten everything from Northern Germany, to Sweden, to Switzerland, to France. (Maybe so few people guess it correctly because, even though everyone knows what Americans sound like, it's so rare to hear an American speaking German.) And when I'm tired, I fall into English sound patterns. Sometimes I even end up saying English words instead of German ones, like the night I tried to go out with my floor after three hours of sleep, and ended up talking about "Östria" -- a blend of Österreich (German) and Austria (English).

I know all of this. My grammar mistakes grate at my ears, so I'm sure they bother my Austrian conversation partners even more. But sometimes, I wonder whether this isn't the Harvard perfectionism creeping in again. Language isn't a formula to apply; it's a communication apparatus. Mine might be a little less stable than most, but if it works, that's the most important thing. But is that just laziness and a lack of ambition talking?

Every time I meet someone new, this dilemma crystallizes itself. If the person already knows I'm an American, they'll say, "Oh, you speak such good German!"* But if they don't know I'm a foreigner, immediately after I speak they ask me, "Where are you from?" or "You're not from Austrian, are you?" Should I take the complement and run? Or strive to not be immediately pegged as a foreigner?

*I also don't know to what extent I should believe the complements I receive. I know that Americans are much more free-wheeling with complements than most other countries, but I also feel like the Austrians are judging me from a different standard of "good German" -- basically, I don't need to speak English with you -- than I would like to judge myself. The one complement I actually believed, though, happened when I was in class with the WU students. Part of our small group work was to read a two-sided explanation of the American mindset behind a specific situation. When my Austrian reading partner flipped the page over, I said, "Whoa, dude, I'm only on the first column. I read really slow." And he said, "Oh, I'm sorry, your German was so good, I forgot that you might take longer." He didn't expect me to be incompetent! Of course, I actually was, which proves yet again that I have a lot of work to do.