Fremder, étranger, stranger
Glücklich zu sehen
Je suis enchanté
Happy to see you
Bleibe, reste, stay
Willkommen! And bienvenue! Welcome!
Im cabaret, au cabaret, to cabaret! ♫
So for the first of my 52 Weeks of New, I picked a doozy. I have decided to learn a new language on my own. The goal is, by the end of the year, to be conversational in German - or, at the very least, know enough to be just a tiny bit dangerous.
To undertake this endeavor, I've enlisted the help of the language-learning app Duolingo. And according to the app, after only seven days, I'm 21% fluent in German.
See? A full 21%. Which is actually slightly horrifying, as I don't feel like I've learned 21% of the entire German language. And when I compare my German progress to my Spanish (I've decided to use the app to simultaneously brush up on my Spanish), I've been speaking Spanish for 14 years, and the app claims I'm only 50% fluent. Au contraire.... no wait....
Anyway, I think my biggest concern with how I'm learning German is the lack of explanation the app provides. There wasn't an introduction to the alphabet with its pronunciation and non-Romance language letters. Nor was there any explanation that der, die und das are the masculine, feminine and neutral forms of the article "the." (I Googled that one.) I still have no idea why some words are capitalized in the middle of a sentence. (Do they stand for letters I don't have on my keyboard? Shrug. Guess that's the next Google query.) Right now I'm being expected to learn a bunch of words and phrases without any explanation of how the grammar and syntax of the language work. Admittedly, when learning Spanish, I was much stronger in the grammar side of the language than the vocabulary. Seems that translates to German as well.
Oh well, I guess I'll trust Duolingo to do its thing, and we shall see. If nothing else, I'll memorize some key phrases and that'll be worth it. And I'll have the opportunity to give the parts of my brain that learned Spanish a good work out. But that's my first big "new" of 2018: learning a new language. What's coming next week? Keine Ahnung!
Bis bald!
Graham
Post Playlist
"Willkommen" from Kander and Ebb's Cabaret
Lena Halls' "Obsessed Hedwig" EP
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