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.