New language, new life

Fri, May 16, 2025

Six months ago, after visiting friends in Switzerland with my wife, pottering along the summits overlooking the Aletsch glacier and giving a happy wave to my old friend the Matterhorn, I decided to learn German.

It’s been years since I was abroad in high mountains, gear clinking on the harness, crampons snipping and biting into the hard pre-dawn glacier ice under a starfull sky, breath streaming, clouding the beam from the headtorch that turned the ice to glitter and diamonds. The silence of metal footsteps. The feeling of being utterly alive in the moment, an adventure just unfolding with an outcome uncertain. Life as it should be.

I still sleep out in my old bivvi bag in the highlands, midges permitting, in places less frequented, remote and nearer to one’s true self. I still like to move with the rock in the Cuillin, dance with the mountain’s lead, following her moves to the summit. These days though,

Ich tanze allein.

I dance alone.

It’s my nature I suppose, to be alone in mountains, where I’m happiest.

Surrounded by the chattering lives around me on the summit of the Eggishorn, munching on some good grub at an outside table, with wife and friends and the remains of the winter snow dazzling under an azure sky, I decided to walk across to the edge of the mountain where it was quieter and sit and just look out over the Aletsch glacier. To look into the world I used to inhabit in younger days. Free as a bird. Strong, fit. Immortal. It made me smile to remember those times. Days of wild risk taking. Nights nearer whatever is beyond this world, high up in the silent mountains where the only noise is the deep of the night, ice forcing loose rock to crash onto glaciers in the moonlight. Glaciers that looked like sleeping ghosts.

The Aletsch is running out. She’s diminishing, Nature is pulling her back in. Where she once held firm to the mountains on either side there are now raw scrapes where her hold has given way and she lies in the middle, far from each side, from each mountain she has caressed for millennia. She will be no more in a time not long to come. But her spirit will be there, held fast in those mountains who know her so well.

Something touched me deep inside, being in the Alps again, walking the green ridges above our friends’ house in the valley. I stood amongst rocks and waved to the Matterhorn. I read the words on the waymarks on the paths that criss-cross the landscape and the sounds and movement they made in my mouth pleased me greatly. I decided it was time to learn a new language. Even the Aletsch’s time is running out.

I’ve been fluent in a ragbag of languages over the years. French, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian. Gaelic is still there, useful in the local CO-OP but I knew nothing about German and we want to visit the Schwarzwald next year and they speak German in Switzerland. So German it was.

Six months later I now have B1 level German. I was very pleasantly surprised at its inner workings, its cases, word order, gutterals, vowels. One sentence can be all gees and bees and the next can be all vowels. It’s like flying and quickly touching your feet on a rocky summit of perfect tense syllables as you fly over on a wisp of vowels. I absolutely loved it. It felt natural. It felt like home. I can’t really explain it but it all just made sense for some unknown reason. I studied with the OU and it was superb.

I started to develop a morning routine of watching a German video on youtube, latterly without the German subtitles showing and one day, it was as if curtains had been drawn back as my vocabulary and grammar had reached the point where a new world had opened up. Watching a video on Simple German Network was where this happened. Something just clicked and a new world appeared.

After that I started to find a beautiful vein of contemporary German folk music and that, along with a quote from Simple German Network sums it all up so far. Life is like the Aletsch but there’s still hope as,

Eine neue Sprache ist wie ein neues Leben!

A new language is like a new life!

The song below completed this particular eddy in life’s stream as it brought all those strands together. An olding man learning a new language and opening a new world and yet, it’s the same world I’ve always loved. The song is about the freedom to choose, to live a good life, to make good choices and to have a free spirit. To live a beautiful life in nature. I dedicate it to the Aletsch. I hope we change the world in time.

I’ll close with a quote from Schön ist die Erde (beautiful is the Earth).

Ich lebe mein leben

It’s the only one I have. Shared with a loved one, dear friends. And Mountains.