Es grünt so grün, wenn Spaniens Blüten blühen

Last night we went to see My Fair Lady in German! It was playing at the Staats Operette, a famous little house for musicals, and our landlord was playing Eliza's father. The experience was wonderful. However a little bit strange. On one level we knew what was going on, and knew the songs, on another level we had no idea what was going on, and the songs were just not right.

As an example, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain". This gets translated into "Es grünt so grün, wenn Spaniens Blüten blühen". A rough translation is "It's green, so green when the Spanish flowers bloom." But what was so interesting is that latter we are discussing the play, and two people around the table, who speak pretty good English, could not translate the expression. So I go home and go to LEO, and as far as I can make out, grünt is not really a word. Although clearly the root is "green".

So I must search the web. I find a site with German tongue twisters at About.com. It has such a loose translation. But it also had an audio link. To hear someone say it click here. So, OK, I am fine. I look out the windows in the sun room, and say to myself "Es grünt so grün".

So back to last night. We also have a conversation which I have had a hundred times. The topic: how does one pronounce the German word for "I", "Ich". This is a pet project of mine, because as you can imagine, the word "I" comes up quite a bit, and one would like to pronounce it correctly. So when we were taking lessons in Seattle, our first German teacher said it one way, and then our second and beloved Jan said it another. So Jan and I worked on this quite a bit until he said my accent was perfect. According to him the "ch" sound should NOT come from the front of the mouth, like we pronounce "ch", but the sound should come more from the back of the mouth. OK, so I have this conversation last night and I pronounce "Ich" and the response is "We are not Palestinians here!" The "ch" sounds is all in the front of the mouth. Hilarious.

I will end with a footnote from the back of the program from My Fair Lady. There were two pages and lessons on how to correctly pronounce difficult German sounds. I will end with the little bit on the short and long "ü". I have no idea, yet, how to translate.

Düstere Züge überall hüllend.
Schüsse über die Mühle brüllend.
Weiber zürnen übel wütend.
Brüder mit Flüchen heftig brütend.