At a press conference in Bonn this week, Joschka Fischer was happy to oblige a reporter who asked for an answer in English to a question about Germany's foreign policy. But halfway through his answer, the 50-year-old Green leader had to turn to one of his colleagues for a little extra vocabulary.
"As you can see, I need some practice," he said.
If coalition negotiations between the Social Democrats and Greens that began yesterday are successful, Mr Fischer will have ample opportunity to practise his English as Germany's first Green foreign minister and vice-chancellor in the new government.
The prospect of a representative of a pacifist, anti-nuclear party shaping the foreign policy of Europe's most powerful nation is enough to send shivers running down many spines in Washington. At least three German ambassadors have privately threatened to quit rather than work under Mr Fischer.
But others at the foreign ministry admire the Green leader's foreign policy expertise and some are actually looking forward to his appointment.
"The desire for somebody we can be proud of, whose speeches in the Bundestag we would secretly applaud, is great," according to one diplomat.
A self-educated butcher's son and former taxi driver, Mr Fischer is one of Germany's most popular politicians, respected by political opponents such as Helmut Kohl and the former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. For many Germans, he is the acceptable face of the Greens, a man who talks sense about the need to make development ecologically sustainable and about the desirability of making Germany a more open, liberal society.
The collapse of his marriage two years ago prompted Mr Fischer to undergo a personal process of reform, giving up alcohol and transforming himself from one of Germany's portliest politicians into today's slender ascetic. Mr Fischer jogs seven miles every morning and when his party colleagues were celebrating their victory on Sunday with sparkling wine, he stuck rigidly to water.
He will need a clear head during the next four years, not only to keep a sharp eye on his Social Democratic coalition partners but to head off the Green grassroots revolts that many observers believe are inevitable.
Founded as a loose coalition of environmentalists, Trotskyists and assorted radicals, the Greens became the voice of Germany's anti-nuclear, anti-American, antiestablishment youth during the 1980s.
The party's former leader, the charismatic Petra Kelly, preached a new political message of environmental responsibility, democracy and non-violence that stood in stark contrast to the traditional parties' appeals to narrow self-interest.
When the first Greens entered the Bundestag in 1983, they were a motley bunch of brightly dressed young radicals. And when Mr Fischer was sworn in as a minister in the state government of Hesse two years later, he wore a t-shirt, jeans and running shoes.
By 1987, the Greens had 42 members in the Bundestag and Germany's main parties had started to adopt some of their environmental policies.
But the party soon found itself torn apart by bitter feuds over ideological purity and lost all its seats in the Bundestag in 1990. During the years that followed, most of the environmental fundamentalists left the party and an alliance with a group of former dissidents from the east of the country, Alliance 90, brought a new dimension to their politics.
The Greens share power with the Social Democrats in four of Germany's 16 federal states and they have even formed coalitions at local level with Dr Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats. During the recent election campaign, Dr Kohl surprised colleagues by predicting that his party could one day share power with the Greens at a national level.
Nobody knows how Germany's new government will shape up but the experience of a redgreen coalition in Germany's most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia offers some clues. The coalition looked set to fall apart earlier this year following a sharp disagreement between the two partners over plans to relocate 7,500 people from 11 towns in order to build Garzweiller II, a 48 square kilometre brown coal stripmine.
The Social Democrats were in favour of the project, which was backed by billions of marks in investment and guaranteed tens of thousands of jobs. The Greens argued that it was environmentally damaging and based on faulty economic reasoning but they calculated that pulling out of the coalition so close to a federal election would be politically foolish.
In their negotiations with Germany's chancellor-elect, Mr Gerhard Schroder, the Greens will attempt to agree as many details of policy in advance, partly to prevent ambushes from party activists.
Apart from Mr Fischer, other Green leaders who can expect a ministerial post include Jurgen Trittin, who already enjoyed a good relationship with Mr Schroeder as a member of his cabinet in Lower Saxony. Although he is frequently characterised by the German media as a fundamentalist, Mr Trittin is in fact among the most realistic and power-orientated within the party.
Controversial remarks such as his comparison of Bundeswehr swearing-in ceremonies with Nazi rituals are guaranteed to win hostile headlines in the conservative press but they are popular among party activists.
Mr Trittin agrees with Mr Fischer that the party's decision-making machinery is in urgent need of reform to ensure that Green ministers in a federal government are not undermined by their own activists. The two men are also agreed that this week's negotiations represent their best chance to make Germany a more open, environmentally responsible and just society.
As the reality of Sunday's election result sank in and it became clear that Mr Fischer's appointment as Foreign Minister is a foregone conclusion, the Green leader began to undergo yet another transformation. When asked about Green foreign policy, the party leader seemed already to have become an international statesman for whom continuity is now the watchword.