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.