A tricky telephone conversation

Anyone who speaks a foreign language will know that certain situations are particularly tricky: for example, when you’re on the telephone (and can’t see the facial expressions and lip movements of the other person); when you’re on the telephone and the person at the other end is giving you distressing news; when you’re on the telephone, the person at the other end is giving you distressing news and can’t pronounce the German consonant "z" properly (the German consonant "z" sounds like "ts" in English).

Last Friday, I had just sat down at my desk to write a post about my experience with crowdfunding, when the phone suddenly rang. It was a local Berlin number, caller unknown. When I picked up, the male voice at the other end of the line sounded excessively jolly; the man was clearly trying not to alarm me. As soon as I heard the word Schwimmhalle, or swimming pool, I realised this would not be a jolly conversation indeed. He was calling to inform me that my son had just had an accident and had injured his "Fahn". He repeated the word that sounded like "Fahn" and I wondered what on earth he meant. I had never heard of a "Fahn". What could you injure in a swimming pool? How worried should I be? He also suggested I should make an appointment with a doctor of some sort. By now I was getting quite frantic.

The German language is renowned for its compound words. The word for doctor is Arzt and the words denoting most specialist doctors are compound nouns ending in arzt. For instance, a paediatrician is a Kinderarzt (literally children’s doctor), a gynaecologist is a Frauenarzt (women’s doctor), a dermatologist is a Hautarzt (skin doctor), while a dentist is a Zahnarzt (tooth doctor). If only I could understand what doctor he meant, then I might be able to guess which part of the body had been injured. After the man repeated the word Zahnarzt several times, I suddenly realised that my son had hurt his tooth.

I put on my face mask, jumped into a taxi and gave the driver the address of the swimming pool. During the short taxi ride, I kept replaying the sentence in my head “Hopefully the tooth can still be saved”, which I realised is what the man had actually said. That didn’t sound too reassuring. When I got to the pool, I saw a group of schoolchildren waiting outside; they were being instructed in the AHA rules. I made my way inside and followed the yellow arrows on the floor, courtesy of the coronavirus regulations, and eventually found my son talking to the Bademeister or pool supervisor. After signing the accident form, we were joined by the swimming instructor, who first told me about the accident, but then proceeded to complain about the other children’s poor breaststroke technique. Somehow it didn’t seem like an appropriate conversation, given that I’d been called there for an emergency.

For anyone who hasn’t learnt to swim in Germany, you should know that children in this country first have to master breaststroke perfectly before they can learn any other stroke. I read in a German newspaper once that this tradition stems from the army: you need to be able to swim with your head above water to hear commands and to keep an eye out for the enemy! 

When we eventually got to the dentist, my son was seen very quickly, and we were reassured that his Zahn wasn’t loose, while his gum would heal rapidly despite looking, in the words of the dentist, gruesome. I will spare you the gory details, suffice it so say, it involved a piece of gum and some bleeding. By Monday morning, the gum had healed as if by magic, and he was able to go back to school. All’s well that ends well.

To go back to the beginning of this story, in order to be able to speak a foreign language on the phone, it’s not enough to be a good listener, you also have to be good at guesswork.

*Photo by Sharjeel Khalid on Unsplash