ich schreibe deutsch

Heute will ich etwas deutsch schreiben. Ich glaube, ich kann jetzt etwas zehr schlicht schreiben. Ich kenne nicht die Vergangenheit so schreibe ich von der Zukunft. Ich denke oft an den Sommer. Ich will irgendwohin reisen, aber wo und wozu? Ich glaube, ich muss ein Programm finden, vielleicht etwas Sprachlich, Freiwillig, Umwelt, oder allen.

Voila, my first paragraph of German. There are numerous difficulties encountered when writing in a foreign language. The first and most evident is a lack of vocabulary, which leads me to choosing the wrong words from the dictionary. The next problem is running into grammatical constructs that I forget or haven't learned. In the last sentence for example, I can't remember what happens when you use a noun as an adjective. I thought you put it in the neuter form, but that doesn't make sense. I think that rules applies to changing an adjective to a noun. So for Sprachlich, which means the noun linguistics, I don't know what form to use when making it into the adjective linguistic. Similarly I don't know what to do with with allen, for all of them, at the end of the paragraph. I'm assuming that it should take the modifierless accusative plural adjective form, but I'm not sure. The third problem is idioms. I imagine my phrases are semantically correctly, but it's likely that a native speaker would employ idiomatic phrases in their stead or at least arrange the words differently. When I write I try to dedicate time to looking up my phrases in Google to see if the structure matches the real world. For example, "Ich glaube, ich kann etwas" matches 394 results in Google, which, given the length of the phrase, means it's probably legitimate. I'd naturally require more results of a two or three word phrase, depending on the popularity of the words. I bet looking up a lot of vocabulary and searching in Google doesn't sound like very enjoyable writing activity. But like all things related to studying foreign language, it's a little more like working on part of a puzzle, or perhaps learning a musical instrument, then the equivalent processes in your native language. The musical instrument example is especially apt because there are constant rewards along the way, whether it mumbling phrases to yourself, or understanding a bit more of what your native-speaking friends are saying. My goal of learning to learn languages is not make it fun and breezy (though it often is.) My intention is to make it an intense, stimulating, and adictive activity that keeps you coming back for more, even if it's punishing at times. That's how I master most things in life, from music to sports to writing software, and I expect the same effort in my language acquisition. Sorry for sounding weighty. It really is 90% fun and 10% discipline.

On a related note, I spent the last two evening deeply immersed in a Hebrew speaking environment. On Friday night I attended the Berkeley Hillel "pre" Shabbat where the musician Idan Raichel was the guest of honor and hung out with a group of 40 of us and answered questions and sang songs with us. The next night I got a ticket to his sold-out show. Both nights I was surrounded by Israelis and American Jews with solid Hebrew skills. Much of the concert was also sung in Hebrew. I can barely pick out two words of Hebrew, despite a brief affair with the language via the first Pimsleur Series a couple years ago. Intense immersion naturally makes me long to learn the language. I can probably spend some time on it while learning German. It's not like I'll confuse them. But I may be treading the line of become a language finatic if I'm trying to learn to new languages at once while maintaining a job and a reasonably well-balanced life! We'll see. I always recall that Barry Farber, who wrote How to Learn any Language (and whom I'm happy to see is still alive but sad to see is a conservative talk-radio host (what a waste,)) said that he regrets that he thought at one point he had learned enough languages and took a break, before eventually resuming and getting up to 25. But I doubt he would recommend two new languages at once.

The first dreams

I woke up in a hot sweat, unable to find meaning in the gibberish from which I had been startled from slumber. One thing was certain though, the tongue bore a striking resemblance to my hour-long study session over chicken pot pie and blueberry cobbler (I had two frozen pie crusts to enlist in dinner duty.) I spoke or perhaps heard an oneiric German, and thus I had crossed a threshold of language immersion. I wouldn't say it was warranted, but sitting down with the book and mp3s for the second time this week resonated the subconscious in a way that my previous study had not. It reminds me of my single week in France when my travel buddy was startled to hear me muttering perfect French in my sleep. He couldn't speak a word of it, so I doubt the "perfect" part of the claim.

There definitely have been other subtle breakthroughs from last night's pastry-fueled practicing. Today I found myself putting simple grammatical constructs together while I worked, namely the one "it is to/for me adjective", such as Der hempt ist mir zu auffällig (The shirt is too bright-colored for me.) I think this grammatical construct resonates with me because it's very noticable in French. As Camus' L'Étranger was fond of saying: Ça m'était égal (It was all the same to me.)

By the way, I know that bright-colored is a pretty useless word to learn, but I remembered it using a ridiculous mnemonic device, which is worth touching on. When I had to learn auffällig it made me think of falling leeks. The phrase I wrote on my flashcard was "Ow! fell leeks on my head as walked through the market during the tornado weaing my bright loud leisure suit" This is a sentence that rates ten on the memorable level but doesn't do much of a job of relating auffällig to the definition: bright, loud. The sentence is too long for me to really remember, as crazy as it is. But I could recall the idea of falling leeks and wearing a bright-colored suit in a market. I didn't remember the Ow! part, so initially I recalled fallig instead of auffällig. But now that I've written this paragraph I'm sure I'll retain the useless adjective acurately. Funny how mnemonics work.

I am finishing unit 8 of 12 in the first FSI German course. The second course goes up to a 24th lesson. I'm really looking forward to learning all the tenses and practicing the informal conjugations, none of which I've been taught yet. The tense part makes sense--there's tons of grammar and basic vocabulary to cover without worrying about tenses. I do wish they brought the informal conjugations in earlier, but that's a diplomat's course for you.