Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

I don't want to go home :P My flatmates are nice, and I feel comfortable here. But I need to go home and see Ben and the cats. Also all 11 kg of my course materials are at home.

I've been poking around the GI website, because I'd like to take the C2 exam (the Grosse Deutsche Sprachdiplom) eventually, and I was looking for some self-study materials, etc. They have some free online, or I could buy this book. They recommend a distance learning course in grammar, which I may opt to do even if I don't take the exam. (After I finish the current study thing. Two at once is absurd.)

I don't know that getting that qualification will do anything special, other than show that, hey, I can speak German really well, so I'm not going to teach people terrible German.

Of course, afaict there are no sites in the US where it's given. Oh, no, they'll give it at the GI in DC and Boston. Getting to DC would be easier & cheaper for me, though since my sister moved back out to Maryland, I don't have a convenient downtown location to sleep for free. The one in Boston looks like it's on the red line between Arlington and Copley.

Either way, this won't be happening this year, and next year looks less unlikely, but they only offer it once or twice a year. So.

La. I think I'm going to go take off my makeup and wash my face.

I'm so not ready for VP this weekend. Augh. I've got laundry drying right now, so I can pack tonight, if I'm lucky, or tomorrow. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to wear.

I'm close to finished with this short story (which needs a better name; I am terrible at naming things and I hate it), so I'm looking for a few good beta readers. I'll email you the file (.doc, .rtf, or .odt--your preference) and hope to get it back by the 20th. I won't have time to work on it while I'm at VP, of course. Comment or PM me.

I get to finish things off in the house, like the almond milk I use for post-workout smoothies, which Ben won't use and won't keep until I get back. Not sure whether I want to make a smoothie for lunch today or tomorrow, though. I also have a persimmon I bought Saturday that is finally starting to become edible. I hope it's ready tomorrow.

I still need to finish The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I am enjoying a lot but not having time to read. I can take it on the plane, but I was kinda hoping to sleep, since I have to get up an hour early Sunday. We'll see.

I'd also like to make more progress in this module, which has finished being about language acquisition theory and turned into instructional methodology.

On which note: progress! I am confirmed for Mannheim Feb 10-22, and after I get back, I'll look more into flights and housing. The woman I've been conversing with sent me documents with hotels and apartment search information, which I will make use of. If any of you German friends of mine are in Mannheim or have friends there who are willing to put me up for about 18 days for less than 500€, please let me know! If you have any tips about Mannheim, also let me know. I've never been there.

(The youth hostel works out to about 440€ for the length of time, and it includes breakfast. But it's a shared room, so ... One plus is that each room has its own shower. I don't know. Hard to unpack in a hostel I think, but everything else is so expensive.)

Anyway, I'm hungry, so I need to get lunch and then get back to revising this story.

In my correspondence with the people at the Goethe Institute, I've noticed that they stick to fairly strict formats in both email and posts on the forum. (Salutation, body, closing, signature) I find this incredibly weird.

When I email people in the US, I find that I typically leave out the salutation after the first response, and almost never use a closing (sincerely, yours, etc). Yes, even in somewhat formal situations!

Is this a weird American cultural thing, a weird internet cultural thing, or what? I know that Americans tend toward informality when at all possible, and Germans tend to err on the side of formality, so it could be that.

I downloaded, filled out, saved, and emailed the registration form to the Goethe people on Saturday. Today I got an email I don't understand, because I *did* fill the form out.

What does this mean? I sent the file to Ben for him to open it in a different program at work, to see if Preview and Adobe aren't playing nice.

vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail, die zuständigkeitshalber an mich weitergeleitet wurde.

Bitte füllen Sie das Antragsformular komplett aus und senden Sie dies an uns zurück.

Should I respond with "Ich dachte, ich hatte das Formular komplett ausgefüllt. Welches Teil habe ich verpasst?" ?

I'm trying to figure out what to do for the writing sample required for grad school applications. They want a 10-20 page "major paper" from an undergrad German Studies course. I ... don't have any. We wrote short papers that were in response to a series of questions/prompts. I have a 5-pager I wrote while I was in Marburg (about Schnitzler's Reigen). I can't find the 3-pager I wrote on Marx & Hegel in Ideas & Power (I found all the other papers, but not that one :P Does anybody have a functional 3.5" floppy drive? Maybe it's miraculously on one of the dozen diskettes I have.)

What I should do is just email the directors of graduate studies and ask which is better, to submit multiple shorter papers (which don't have secondary sources or research, either, because we didn't have access to German journal in college) or to write a new one.

What I've been doing is checking out books from the library and downloading all the articles that sound interesting.

I thought maybe I could do a translation paper, so I translated a piece and then found this and gave up on life. Like, LITERALLY minutes after finishing the translation, I went to that site to look up this article for ideas on things to include in a translation paper, and OH LOOK at what's on the front page. GAH.

It's a good story, though, and you should go read it.

So maybe I'll pick something else. There's one that looks like a fun challenge because of all the plays on words and cultural references, and another longer piece that I liked (which would make it easier to hit 10 pages ngl).

I don't know. *flails*

There are a lot of similarities between German and English, enough that it can lull you into a false sense of security. It leads to things like Berlin finally becoming a world-class airport (bekommen=receive) and ich bin sensibel (sensibel=sensitive).

There's a list of false cognates here, if you're curious.

I'm studying/reviewing for a language test right now, and one of the things I know always screws me up is verbs with fixed prepositions, so I'm spending some time with that. (There's a helpful list in Dreyer & Schmitt.)

So, German prepositions aren't always 1-to-1 translateable for English ones. I'd say most are, but not all. Über, for example, means over or above, but also about, as in talking about something. Nach means after, but also toward (ich reise nach Athen) or in accordance with (gebraut nach dem Reinheitsgebot).

Which means you get set phrases like

jdn. danken für
jdn. ärgern mit
herrschen über

which are easy to remember because they're just like the English thank someone for, anger someone with, rule over.

But then you get

fragen nach

which means literally ask after, which is technically sensical English, but it's not the first thing I choose (ask about). It may be more common in British English, I'm not sure.

Then there's the ones that are like English in that they use a different preposition depending on context:

kämpfen mit den Freunden
kämpfen gegen die Feinde
kämpfen für den Freund
kämpfen um die Freiheit

English collapses the last two into "fight for," and German may have the same ambiguity of fighting with (ie alongside vs against) (native speakers, help me out).

And I'm only on p 100 out of 300. -_-

Saturday I went to the UNC library to get a borrower's card (which I got for free with my Durham Tech student ID woo), use the computers for some research, and check out some books.

I got Feridun Zaimoglu's short story collection "Zwölf Gramm Glück," then I couldn't remember the name of the person who wrote "Mutterzunge," so I looked that up: Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Back to the opposite end of the 8th floor stacks, not quite as far as Zaimoglu.

I follow the Library of Congress numbers down to the bottom shelf, find Özdamar. Shelved beside her was Selim Özdogan, so I picked up a couple of his books and decided to go with "Ein Glas Blut," which is a collection of short stories and poetry.

I started with Mother Tongues, because it's in English (UNC doesn't have a single copy in German). It's very Literary. I've ordered a copy in German, and it shipped today, so I should get it sometime soon. I don't need to return the books until 2/18 (and I *think* I can renew them, not sure). But I spent a good bit of the first few pages wanting to know what the language was like before it was translated, then it got weird. (Literary weird.)

So I started reading Ein Glas Blut, since they're all short, a page or three. Some of the poems are confusing for me, though I'm not sure if that's because there's some reference or context I'm missing. Some of them are just fine. I liked the one called "Drei Fragen," where he asks three questions. I read that out loud to Ben, translated mostly on the fly.

There's another one, traueratem, that's I think supposed to be/was originally spoken word, because there's one section that has this distinct defined rhythm and rhyme scheme that sounds very much like rap. I read it out loud to Ben, in German, and he agreed.

I like this a lot better than Mother Tongues, though I'll withhold judgment until I get that in German to compare. Sometimes translations can be really weird. (Or it could just be, you know, Lit'ry.)

Then I looked him up on Wikipedia, and it turns out he wrote a fantasy novel. (Or a regular novel that was nominated for a science fiction prize. Whichever. It sounds kind of magical realism-ish. If I can find a cheap copy here, maybe I'll buy it.

The library also has Heimstr 52, which sounds from its Amazon blurb like the sort of thing I'm looking for. (Also, there are lots of papers written on the metaphor of travel and transit in Turkish German literature.)

I should start with the Zaimoglu soon.

I just wish I read as fast in German as I do in English. Then again, I read *really fast* in English. If I'm actually paying attention, I read a lot slower.

On Facebook, I said, "talk me out of applying for a PhD in German studies."

Two people are trying to talk me INTO it.

Application deadline is December 8.

It's a joint UNC-Duke program, and I can't find any information on which school's tuition you pay. (UNC's would be so much cheaper.)

The main reason I didn't continue my German studies right after college (aside from thinking I wanted to be an O-Chem professor, hahahaha, lol) was because I didn't think I could get a decent-paying job with that. I really hate that a mercenary decision I made when I was 17 (ie, to go into sciences because $$$) is controlling my present and future.

(I also really like public transit and urban planning and smart growth, but German is something I've loved forever, or since the late 80s, anyway, when I started studying the language.)

Problems I see: a) I want to write. b) There's the barest chance I could get my shit together in time for the December 8 application deadline. c) I wouldn't be able to go to VP next year, if I get in. d) I'm a horrible student--total slacker. Though maybe if it's something I care about, it would be easier.

So, maybe I think about it for the next 6 months, figure out the answers to the questions they want answered on their application form, and make a decision then. I know myself, and, while I make impulsive, snap decisions, this is kind of huge. (Also, I don't really have any 10-20 page papers. The one I wrote on Schnitzler's Reigen when I was in Marburg is 5 pages (I got a 2 on it), and I found my collected papers for Ideas and Power in the Modern World, which included some German philosophy (Marx & Hegel, mainly, also Kant), but they're all 3-5 pages, too.

Argh, I don't know.

I watched the Hertha-Düsseldorf match today. I'd planned to get up at 7:15 for the 7:30 show and shower when it was over, but I was awake at 6:30 anyway, so I showered and ate breakfast before the match. It was a heart-stopper, that one! First Düsseldorf scored on a major defense error on our part, then Ramos equalized, then Düsseldorf went ahead by one, then Rukavytsya equalized. Then Lasogga got us the 3:2 and in the last seconds of stoppage time, Ramos sealed the deal with the 4:2. The defense today was shaky as shit, and there were a couple close calls from Fortuna on top of the 2 goals conceded. But next week, Captain Mijatovic's 2-match ban off a dodgy red card will be up, so his unshakable solidity will be back.

I saw a link on twitter to an interview with my favorite national player, Arne Friedrich. Then, because I'm like that, I decided to translate the whole thing. It was longer than I expected, and it took me about 2 hours to get the first draft. Then I got a buddy to read over the English for me and mark the awkward/overliteral areas, and I cleaned it up this morning.

I kind of like doing translations, actually. It's fun. I have no idea how to make use of this skill, other than for translating interviews with footballers for non-German speakers on livejournal. Publishing houses likely have their own translation staff, and I'm not qualified at this point to do books. I've thought about calling UNCC and asking about their translation studies certificate (which is 4 courses during a regular BS/BA program), but they're in Charlotte, and that's far to go for a class. Also, I have no money for tuition.

I should come up with huge lists of pros and cons of moving to Berlin, though the pro side would mostly read "IT'S BERLIN, ISN'T THAT ENOUGH?"

Lebkuchen
Baumkuchen
Spekulatius
Dominosteine
Pfeffernüsse
Or most anything on this page.

(And Laugenbrötchen... but not just for Christmas. They're DELICIOUS. Especially when you put Nutella on them. Mmmm, total lecker.)

Since my language ability could be classified as preternatural, it may be possible that I expect too much of other people when they are faced with a foreign language.

After all, I did borrow Sylvain's French-German dictionary (since the teacher had explicitly barred me from bringing my German-English dictionary to class) to look up German legal terms regarding trials (prisoner, defendant, plaintiff, alleged, etc). The fact that a majority of English legal terms are Latinate in origin, and thus share a root with the French, no doubt helped. A lot of English words have Latinate roots (the fancy ones, mostly, since the more vulgar versions have Germanic roots: excrement vs shit), so I can sort of figure out some very basic stuff written in a Romance language.

Then there are all the cognates of German in English: bread/Brot, knight/Knecht, sun/Sonne, hell/Hölle, stool/Stühl (which actually means chair, but never mind that), board/Brett ... the list goes on.

(I'm sticking to Indo-European languages here, and not including, say, Hungarian or Japanese, because they're from different language families, and are quite different in vocabulary.)

I would expect a peer to be able to deduce that, for example, "am Montag 26. Juli um 19:00 Uhr" has something to do with Monday July 26 and 7 pm (19:00). Not so much with, I don't know, "Doch ich sage euch: Gott existiert und wenn ich euch seinen wahren Namen verrate, werdet ihr vom Unglauben abfallen und Gott preisen, denn Gottes wahrer Name ist: KEIN SCHWEIN." Except maybe it has something to do with God and pigs and names.

(That book, though? LAUGH RIOT. Until the ending, which is typisch Deutsch. Kann ich aber unbedingt empfehlen, wenn dir Terry Pratchett gefällt.)

Do I expect too much?

This ramble brought to you by procrastination.

From an article on the Secret Service (in German): Sch(m)utzengel.

Schutzengel: guardian angel
Schmutz, schmutzig: dirt, dirty

Combine them, and you get a tarnished guardian angel. Nifty, eh?

I may rant a bit here, so be forewarned.

I'm so tired of people saying German is an ugly language, a harsh language, not a poetic language. I'm tired of trying to explain how they're wrong and completely uninformed, ignorant, and clearly not remotely familiar with the actual German language.

Have they never heard of Friedrich Schiller, often referred to as the German Shakespeare? Or his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who spawned an entire literary movement (introspection) and inspired the works of Mozart? Or Heinrich Heine, one of the most famous German Romantic poets and he who said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people"?

Leaving aside the copious examples of German poets, one aspect of the German language lends itself remarkably well to poetic expression: the (infamous) compound noun. There are nouns in German that require a full phrase (sometimes even a clause) to render in English. To take a well-known example, Schadenfreude: the (malicious) delight you take in someone else's misfortune.

Goethe contributed a delightful compound word to the corpus, which is a hapax legomenon (thanks joyeuse13 for the term!): Knabenmorgenblütenträume, in his poem Prometheus. (Yes, this is one of the poems I learned in college. My professor pointed out the uniqueness of the word, and it stuck in the back of my head.) A literal deconstruction of the word is boys' morning blossom dreams, which can sound a bit dirty. A better rendering is "the blossoming dreams of the morning of [my] youth."

The stanza:

Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehn,
Weil nicht alle Knabenmorgen-
Blütenträume reiften?

An approximate translation, not poetic:

Do you believe (implied: wrongly)
that I should hate life,
flee to the desert,
because not all the blossoming dreams of the
morning of my youth ripened?

The entire poem is about an angry Prometheus berating Zeus, asking why he should honor him. Interestingly, the entire compound noun only appears in the early version of the poem.

Don't disparage the language because of your ignorance. Make an effort to learn about it. You'll find you're rather wrong.