I’m taking Spanish classes. Three cheers for geekdom. Have completed Le Fantome de l’Opera, and am reading Harry Potter a l’Ecole des Sorciers. (Four cheers for geekdom.) Might even take German in the Fall (will hold off on that fifth cheer until then.) Turns out I don’t have a sincere need for meaning in my life, merely a sincere need to be busy. Guess I’m shallow that way.
True to form, I managed to put my foot in my mouth at, literally, the first opportunity, in Spanish class. The weather had turned wintry foul, people were drifting in, chatting a bit. La profesor walks in 30 seconds late, and I say, (in a manner intended to be light and bantery,) “We thought we were going to have to elect a teacher!” It’s possible that I imagined she spent the next hour and a quarter glaring at me...I don’t know. Perhaps I can redeem myself through abject obsequiousness--I understand college teachers tend to appreciate we aged students. But sometimes I can’t tell whether they see me as an aged student, or as an ugly kid who hasn’t slept in 5 years.
‘Twas interesting that, at Gabe’s last two Kung Fu classes, I sat near another kid’s French au pair who was reading a novel in English while referring frequently to her Dictionnaire Francaise/Anglaise, as I read Harry Potter while referring with even greater frequency to my French/English Dictionary. Perhaps what I’m really doing is preparing for my next incarnation in which I will actually be fairly bright.
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1 comment:
I never knew this blog existed. Well, I guess I knew but I didn't ever click on the button until today. :)
German is much much harder than French or Spanish because it still has inflection, which English, French, and Spanish have all but entirely lost. There are four cases and each noun and adjective changes form depending on which case it is used as.
German nouns also have three genders and the assigning of gender is completely arbitrary. In Spanish if something ends in 'a', it's feminine, etc., but in German there are simply no rules whatsoever. You just gotta learn each word's gender one at a time, word for word.
The same thing goes for plurals. It's really a nasty system and I hate it but it sounds so pretty and is the most important language in historical psychology and philosophy so I keep at it.
German also has insane word order. Verbs often are the very last word in the sentence, which I find to be...uh...not right.
Even though it's technically closer to English than is French or Spanish, compared to them German really is a totally different animal. I've heard though that if a person ever wanted to learn Icelandic, a knowledge of German would help. :oP
Cran
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