Tag Archives: language

Everything our family of four (and two dogs) possesses is now in my parents’ house — including us. Granted our belongings are no longer massive: approximately 25 small shipping boxes, 3 guitars, a typewriter, and 2 large suitcases per person. No furniture.

We are moving to Switzerland with stops along the way.

Stop 1: Still in Southern California, hours from the our home, I’m sitting in the house I grew up in. And now seems as good a time as any to look back on the last few months, breaking down how we ended up here. And how we will end up there. To do that, I’ll have to venture back in time a bit, and start somewhere near the trailhead for this journey.

My husband and I have talked about him leaving his job for years. He is a much nicer, much gentler, much more optimistic person than I am, so whenever I said, “It’s not gonna get better,” he’d say, “Well, they just said they would do…” (He’s a big believer in people — one of the reasons I love him — and also one of the reasons it took a while for him to leave his job.) And he’d go on working there for months and months, and we’d go through this cycle of discussion regularly.

Until he couldn’t take the stress or the angst anymore. Around the start of the school year, he told the company he was leaving at the end of the calendar year, 2023. The discussions between the two of us regarding his job shifted, necessarily, from the usual cycle we’d grown accustomed to to the unknown of the job market.

With a stable job as a teacher and a good school district for our sons, I wasn’t particularly keen to move. Still, I knew it was a real possibility that, as my husband applied to or networked for jobs that fit his particular set of (esteemed) skills, it may not be in the San Diego area. He’s a physicist. A chemical physicist. A physical chemist. It all means the same thing to me; which is to say, I don’t know what it means. (And, yes, I have no idea what he’s talking about when he tells me his tasks and shows me his graphs of what he’s working on; I just read his intonation to figure out if he’s excited or disappointed about what he’s discovering.)

“Maybe I can do something else,” he’d say, “in order to keep us here for sure. Then the boys could graduate here, at least.”

See? Sweet, gentle, giving man. Looking to make it easier for others.

“Like what?” I’d ask — though I don’t know why, because, no matter what he might be doing for a living, I’m not likely to understand a lick of it.

“I basically do a lot of data analysis now, I could probably do something in that field. I know…” or “I know a lot about ____,” and he’d continue with his list of people he knows in all sorts of fields who could help him find a job locally.

So he did everything: worked at the job he was leaving, looked for local jobs, and looked for jobs that could take us to, well, anywhere. He was speaking with companies in Paris, London, one somewhere in New Zealand, San Diego, Boston, Los Angeles, San Jose, and, of course, Zurich. It felt as though there were leads everywhere. So many, to me, that I set it on the shelf in my mind until something was more tangible. Meanwhile, he had to consider everything as imminent.

“There’s a company in Zurich,” he told me one morning, “doing direct air capture.”

This was before my morning coffee, so I did not know if Zurich was the neighboring town in San Diego or a Hawaiian island. Direct air capture sounded like logical words; I’d have to translate them later, after caffeine.

“Cool,” I said, probably with little enthusiasm.

“They have a few job openings I’m interested in. What do you think about Switzerland?”

Okay. Time to wake up, I thought. “Switzerland would be cool.”

“You know my family is Swiss? We’re from Bern.”

“Yeah, cool,” I said.

He applied to several positions at this company in Switzerland, and soon they requested an interview.

I confess, as long as I was going to a full-time job myself, working with the lovely young generation of middle schoolers I found myself with each morning, I didn’t have much headspace for his job hunt. I was excited and proud for all his leads and phone calls and even interviews, but I’d drop those thoughts for most of the day to be Teacher and then Mom. He could give you the more gripping version of this — alas, he’s busy doing consulting work these days, but we will get to that — much later.

For both of us, this job hunt felt long. Leads, leads, then nothing. Phone calls, phone calls, then quiet. It was early November when this company in Zurich, having already conducted several interviews online, told him they’d like to fly him out to have an onsite interview.

Now, if my husband is the big believer in the ability for everyone to change and things to go well, I am the bare-bones, just-the-facts, pragmatic bottom liner. So my train of thought was, “They’re willing to fly him from San Diego to Zurich? They’ll have to put him up in a hotel. That’s thousands of dollars. They are offering him the job.”

Time to learn German.

In fact, I was sitting in a traffic jam outside Lahaina on a family vacation when I figured, might as well capture this time for tutelage.

[Okay, my American friends. I know you speak English and, I don’t know, maybe a little Spanish or French you learned in high school, but you probably haven’t used it much since. So now I’m talking about European languages, yes, but I’m talking specifically about the tiny country of Switzerland, best known, I’d say, for their chocolate and their tennis star, Roger Federer. If you aren’t a tennis fan, that’s okay, and if you aren’t a Roger Federer fan, that’s really not okay, but I’m going to give you a chance to change that. Either way, you need to know that one of the most impressive things about elite tennis players in general is that they play in hours-long matches, sprinting from side to side, playing mind games with their opponents, for sometimes three or four hours before a winner is declared, and then, after all they’ve done, someone shoves a microphone in their face for an on-court interview in the language of the location. At the French Open? Speaking French. Wimbledon? That’s English. And most of these athletes are neither French, British, or American. So, take Roger Federer, an all-time great who has won every grand slam tournament there is. And, of course, he’s Swiss, but he’s gliding through these interviews in English just as he glides on the court. Same thing in French. And he’s also spoken in Italian and Mandarin in the post-match interviews, depending on where the match itself is located. Anyway, I digress. The point is I know English. I’m great at English. I know a little Spanish. I can get by with my high school Spanish. I do not know any other languages anywhere near proficient enough to survive a basic conversation, and we are talking about moving to Switzerland where the spoken language, Roger Federer’s first language, is Swiss German.]

Switzerland has four official languages, and none of them are the language Swiss children learn first. Although Swiss German is spoken, it has no grammar. It’s not really a written language. I like to think of it as the opposite of a language like Latin. In English, we call languages like Latin that are no longer spoken, a “dead language.” Swiss German isn’t dead; it’s spoken, but only spoken. I wouldn’t call it a “live language.” That seems like it would be a written and spoken language. So, not being a linguist as previously proven, I’m going to call Swiss German a “spirit language.” I think it fits. It’s not confined by grammar (aka structure, like a skeleton) so it can’t have a body. It’s not dead, it has no body, it must be spirit.

Again, I digress.

In Switzerland, the four official languages are German (thus where I began), French, Italian, and Romansh (which I’d never heard of in forty years of living). Swiss German is not an official language. Hmmm….

If my husband is going to be offered a job in Switzerland, I need to get on my language game to consider the offer seriously.

Why did I pick German to begin with? I don’t recall, though I can substantiate it with logic. I’m sure you can, too. Say “Zurich.” Really. Say it. Out loud. Whisper if you must. If you hadn’t any idea where this place was but knew it was a place where they were likely to speak German, French, Italian, or Romansh, which would you go with? German, of course. The “ch” at the end of the word chokes of guttural phlegm production. Must be German.

I open my language app I use for Spanish — since I am a teacher in the San Diego area. “Which one of these is coffee?” it asks. My choices: Milch, Kaffee, Brot.

I’m going to rock German, I think.

“Which one of these is milk?”

I’m already fluent.

“Du bist ein Dummkopf.”

Strange. I don’t know how to translate that.

So I’m sitting in a rental car in a Hawaiian traffic jam caused by I-don’t-know-what, learning German.

“I want to learn German!” I hear from the back seat. “Can I do that, too?” asks the younger of my two sons.

“Sure,” I say, thinking only about the fact that he seems exhilarated by the idea and that would make for a good distraction as we move the width of three palm trees per minute.

Then I realize I’m about as exhilarated internally as he is externally about the idea of learning another language and about the notion that we could be living abroad. I’ve always wanted to live abroad. I spent a summer in Hungary teaching English in preparation for a year in Budapest, which fell through at the last minute. And no, I don’t speak Hungarian. I am even, somewhere, on tape — yes, tape — as an eighteen-year-old at my high school Grad Night being asked about the Twenty Year Reunion twenty years in the future. (Now, when I hear this question being posed to a graduate of a few hours, my left eyebrow raises, but at the time, I took it in stride and said) “I won’t be at the reunion. I’ll be living in London.”

Which, of course, did not happen.

But my motivation for saying that was partly about living abroad — and partly about being a book editor, which, also, didn’t happen.

Arranging for an on-site interview in a country nine hours ahead of you is a bit challenging. 9:00 AM in Switzerland is midnight on the California coast. 5:00 PM there is 8:00 AM in San Diego. So, their work day overlaps with our early morning sleep schedule. Since our household gets up between 6am and 7am, we have about an hour or two each day to contact Switzerland live. Otherwise, all communication must be conducted at a snail’s pace via email, waiting through the night to receive a response — if they get to it in fewer than 24 hours.

Eventually, the interview was set for Monday November 20th. Thanksgiving week here in the States. Just another work week there in Zurich.

No, of course, that’s not all! That’s the first leg. You thought I could tell this whole thing in one post??!

Don’t worry, Leg 2 is coming. We’re going to need at least a second leg so that I don’t fall over.