christmas is coming

Tonight was the first rehearsal for the Christmas show. Miss Shirley and E.C. are back, yay!! G-dog's not there this year, boooo. It's so exciting getting started. We heard all about the show from the artistic director and various designers. Then we learned some music.

This year the theme is French Canadian, which means not only singing in a foreign language, but singing in a foreign language with a really funky Canadian accent. Also, some of the songs are in French French.

Many of us speak some French, and most of us are inveterate know-it-alls. At our first meeting back in June, several little debates broke out about pronunciation. I told Miss Shirley at the time that this was a preview of the fall, and indeed - many people tonight offered helpful comments, critiques, and suggestions about pronunciation. This didn't happen the year we sang in Norwegian.

-iers and -ants

Hey - someone from Estonia found my blog by googling "russian occupants out of georgia." Unfortunately, I don't think they stuck around long enough to learn that it should be "occupiers." (My original post.)

peer gynt

Guess what? I joined another choir. This one is singing Peer Gynt next week and they really needed some extra voices. And they're singing it in Norwegian. I was afraid I might be put on the spot, so I went through it with a dictionary last night but I couldn't find most of the words I didn't know - there's Danish, dialect, all kinds of wacky stuff going on in there. And indeed, when the alto who recruited me introduced me at tonight's rehearsal, she said that I speak Norwegian.

So we're working on diction in this one passage and the director asks me for some sense of what we're singing, and I'm like, "Uhhhhhhh...." Here's what I can translate of that section: "We are thoughts, you should have thought us. [Noun], you should have [verbed] us. [Adverb] we should have as [adjective] [plural noun]...." It's this really odd, abstract poem sung by a knot (yeah. no idea.) and a chorus of withered leaves, and it has a whooole lotta vocab I didn't learn in Norway.

I think he gave up on my alleged language skills then, but I redeemed myself later in the evening when we were singing a passage that goes "The prophet has come! Play flute and drum! To us he has come, over the sand sea riding!" *That* I can translate. Basic nouns and cognates are my forte.

stupidity

The other day I was reading the paper while I ate my lunch and got to the comic strip Liō, which the Washington Post picked up fairly recently. I already didn't like it much, but now I also think it's dumb. Here, read the strip in question and come back.

I'm assuming the artist wanted the samurai to be saying "Banzai!" which, well, I don't think samurai really yelled that, but it would make sense for the joke. But guess what that word actually is?

Yep, the samurai is yelling "Dwarf tree!" Not quite as threatening, is it? Newsflash: those characters aren't just pretty little stick drawings. They actually have meaning. Compare: Banzai - 万歳; Bonsai - 盆栽.

je pense à toi

Today I had lunch with Barkley, partly because she has a degree in French and could help me get the pronunciation right on the song I'm singing for auditions for the Christmas show. I was worried because French vowels are pretty weird, and, while I did take French and have a basic idea of what sounds all the letters make, I didn't know if my accent was any good. Turns out? My accent is totally fine. No problems. She even told me how to do French Canadian R's, which are way easier than French R's. Whew. The audition is next Friday - fingers crossed!

one more polar bear post

Look, Knut's getting a stamp. That link goes to his blog, which includes an English translation of the text on the stamp. I don't think it takes a working knowledge of German to realize that the English translation is wrong. This illustrates the danger of false cognates: "bewahren" doesn't mean "beware."

cute signs

I think I knew that "robot" means "worker" in Czech, but I was still surprised and amused to see it on signs. (Polish is not the same as Czech, but they're related.) I also love "Uwaga!" which I assume means "Caution!" and makes me think of alarm sirens going "aOOOOga! aOOOOOga!"

Also, check out the adorable stenciled graffiti:

the bad parts

It's interesting how memory works. All day today I was seeing people I hadn't seen for two weeks and going through the whole, 'hey, how are you, how was your vacation' thing. And I told them all: Fantastic! Amazing! Berlin is awesome! And Poland is, too!

And I remember it really positively. I mean, it was a totally cool trip.

But if I think back on it, a lot of the minutes were really kind of crappy. My feet hurt almost all of the time. Despite being very good at languages, I have a total complex about speaking them, specifically about having someone get fed up and switch to English, so I tend to avoid contexts where this might happen - which includes restaurants. So I kept a terrible eating schedule and was often under-energized. I instantly disliked the only German person I met in a social context. And one of the operas I saw was *terrible.* (Ok, but it was so hilariously awful that it's becoming part of the vacation narrative.)

Still, though - this vacation was so great! I totally want to go back.

My essay questions for you: Do your vacations suck in the same ways, or different ways, or are you incredibly cool, well-adjusted, and pain-free? And do you focus on the good parts? I mean, I'm not just trying to convince people that it was good so I can feel better about myself. It really was awesome.

silly words

Today in my new German class my teacher wrote the word "die Wechselpräposition" on the board, which is a preposition that takes accusative or dative depending on how it's being used. Ok, it doesn't matter what it means, it's a long word, and someone was like, you Germans with your long words.

So my teacher's like, ha! You think that's long? Today I had to fill out a
"Doppelstaatsbürgerschaftserlaubnisantrag"! (Application for permission to hold double citizenship.)

This class has about a dozen people (my last class had four on a good day). I missed half the introductions, but I can tell you that the class includes a lawyer from Georgia, a woman in the Air Force (there were people in class who didn't know what "Luftwaffe" meant! cmon, people!), a Catholic priest from Poland, and a French political scientist who talks a lot.

UPDATE, five minutes later: How could I forget to tell you about this new German word? You do it every day - it's a verb - it's "googeln." Past tense: "Ich habe gegoogelt."

class = good

Today was my last German class and you were right to tell me to do it. (And, Wurzy, you were right to tell me to carefully consider and maybe not do it.) I reviewed a ton of stuff and had enforced German-listening time four days a week. I really liked the other students and the teacher, too, and I'm considering taking a class in the regular semester - it would only meet two nights a week, and for an hour and a half instead of two and a half hours at a time.

German literature

Nerdy awesomeness: Tonight I went to Borders and bought Im Westen nichts Neues (you may know it as All Quiet on the Western Front), a book of poems by Goethe, and a big new German-English dictionary (time to suck up and start learning the reformed spelling).

I'm going to give All Quiet on the Western Front the old college try, although I really don't think my language skills are up to it...I'll probably be able to follow the plot, but you might not want to question me too deeply on how the narrator feels about events.

The Goethe book has German on the left side and English on the right - I actually wish it didn't have the English, because it's so tempting to look over at it. Even though I don't understand every word (ok, sometimes I don't understand most of the words), it's fun to read the poems and follow his rhyme and meter. I already know two of them - I had to memorize "Der Erlkönig" in 11th grade and I sang a Schubert setting of "Heidenröslein" in college.

(Bonus video: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing "Der Erlkönig." Awesome. I did *not* sing this in college.)

die Ostalgie

We learned the best word in German today: die Ostalgie. "Nostalgie" means nostalgia and "Osten" is East Germany, so stick them together and you get a word that means nostalgia for the good ol' days of the German Democratic Republic.

When I was in Colorado with my parents, I made them watch the movie Good Bye Lenin! - and today my teacher mentioned it as the beginning of the Ostalgie-Wave. It's about this boy whose mother is in a coma when the Berlin Wall falls and her doctor says it could kill her to find out the truth, so he recreates East Germany in their apartment. It's sweet, and for people who lived in East Germany, it evokes the lives they lived in a country that no longer exists - the cars, the weird coffees and canned beans, everything they grew up with. It's a nice little movie and I highly recommend it.

Then for the reasons why you might *not* want to go back to East Germany, watch The Lives of Others. (Glad you liked it, Dahvay - that movie is the bomb, am I right??)

In other German pop culture news, I read in the Berlin Lonely Planet today that the U2 song "Zoo Station" is about Bahnhof Zoo, an old train station in Berlin that used to be full of street people and teenage heroin addicts and whatnot.

I am so psyched to go to Berlin and see all this stuff.

Ich glaube, daß diese Regel dumm ist.

Now I will rant about German. In English, things evolve. In English, eventually we'll just give up on people ever figuring out that "irregardless" is not a word and just let them use it. Stuff shifts, the language evolves, whatevah.

In other languages, they have Rules. Germany has recently done away with my favorite letter: ß. It's called the "es-tsett" and makes basically the same sound as "ss." Actually, it's still in a lot of words, but a few years ago The Authorities declared that the word "daß" - one of my favorite words, partly because it is super fun to write the ß and partly because it wreaks grammatical havoc on any sentence in which it appears - is now to be written "dass." This is lame and stupid.

Our teacher explained this the other day (after I had written "daß" several times in an essay) and I was like, well, ok, but if I *like* the ß, can I use it anyway? (I think this makes me the grammar equivalent of a crotchety old man - goldurn newfangled ways, can't make ME do it.) And he was like, "....not really." Actually, he answered with one of my new favorite German words: "Jein." It's what you get when you stick "ja" and "nein" together.

But, I mean, cmon. I only learned German 12 years ago. It's not like I'm trying to speak classical Greek in Athens.

Sigh.

Check, please!

The Süddeutsche Zeitung has an American slang quiz on its website - you can play little sound clips of a guy who kind of sounds like a muppet saying the phrases, then pick the closest meaning in German. They range from "just blow it off" (modern slang, yes) to "let's talk turkey" (have you ever actually heard someone say that?).

Pick the right answer and it says: "Awesome! Ihre Antwort ist richtig!" My ego is too delicate for me to risk my score by finding out what it says if you answer wrong.

Ha! The last phrase includes a word you can't print in a family newspaper! Now if only someone would create a *German* slang quiz for me....

Freiburg/Fribourg

For some reason, the first lesson in my German textbook is about Freiburg/Fribourg, a city in Switzerland on the German-French linguistic border. Everybody speaks German and French there (and probably Swiss German and English and maybe Italian or something else, too - dang Europeans with their mad language skilz).

For homework we had to look up stuff about Freiburg online, and I found the website of their brand-new movie theater, which has a totally complicated schedule: Different showings of the same movie can be in VF (dubbed in French), VD (dubbed in German), or in the original language with French and German subtitles (Odf).

Let's see...tomorrow you could see Bee Movie at one of two showings dubbed in German or three in French. Good, it makes sense to dub kids' movies. Michael Clayton only has subtitles, but you can choose to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age in French or with subtitles. If you want to see I Am Legend, however, you're going to have to settle for Will Smith speaking ze Francais.

How weird must it be to see a movie with subtitles in both French and German? It seems like the writing would take up half the screen.

Deutsch ist viel Spaß

Tonight was my first German class. And you know what? It was great. I love language classes. The group consists of me, a Tunisian dude, a chick who has achieved extremely minor fame through the blog she writes for work (but enough fame for me to be dorkily excited to meet her), and a high school Latin teacher.

The blogger and I took German in high school and college, and the other two have never taken German before. So our levels are somewhat different. I found myself whipping out sentences with subordinate clauses, and blogger chick graduated recently enough that she still has a pretty good vocabulary. Meanwhile, Tunisian dude and Latin dude were struggling with word order. I'm totally impressed the two of them are there - they both seem to have taught themselves basic German.

When I left, I couldn't wait to go home and do my homework. Four whole days til another class! How will I make it? (I sound like the Monkey.)

language learning

I decided I'm going to Germany. Now here's my question: How insane is it, precisely, if I hand over the month of January to the German language?

The Goethe-Institut, which is conveniently located on my way home from work, has an intensive course at the right level for me. It meets four nights a week (Mon-Thurs), starting this Wednesday and going until January 30th. With January holidays, that means two weeks with four classes and three weeks with two to three classes. I took German in high school in college, so theoretically I speak it (although it's been kind of supplanted by Norwegian).

Pluses: I love studying languages; German is fun; Revels is over, so what else am I doing with my time; this would mean I'd be able to talk to people in stores and understand TV shows and stuff. (If I were an extrovert, I'd also be able to, like, talk to strangers and make new friends, but I've pretty much given up that battle.) Also, I'd have a useful language in my head, and you never know when you'll need another language.

Minuses: I like to sleep; I'd get home two to four nights a week at 9:15 or 9:30; it costs money (although I'd use birthday money for most of the fee). And I have other options for brushing up my German, like podcasts and Netflix and my office neighbor, who is a translator and teaches a short free class once a week.

So. How insane is this? Weigh in. I have until Wednesday to decide.

gizzard

Tonight I went to a French restaurant with S.Vix and was kind of surprised by the number of things on the menu I didn't want - I hate eggs and cheese and I'm not that into organ meats. This made me feel like a nasty, picky American, particularly the organ meat thing, so I decided on a salad that included duck gizzards. I picked this partly because I wasn't 100% sure what gizzards were, which is a clear advantage over sweetbreads.

If you have also wondered about gizzards, my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1974 ed.) says: The muscular enlargement of the alimentary canal of birds that immediately follows the crop and has usually thick muscular walls and a tough horny lining for grinding the food.

So it's stomach. I guess that's not so bad. Just for entertainment, I checked some of the other dictionaries on my shelf:

• Webster's New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (1988) - The second stomach of a bird: it has thick muscular walls and a tough lining for grinding food that has been partially digested in the first stomach. (Did dictionaries get easier in those 14 years or does this publisher written for dumber people than the other one?)

• Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1959) - derives, with -ard substituted for -er, from ME giser: OF giser (later gisier, F gésier): VL gigērium: by b/f from L gigēria, poultry-entrails offered as sacrifice, (later) gizzard: perh of Iranian origin; perh also akin to L iecur, liver.

• Cappelen Engelsk Ordbok (2004) - krås. (That's Norwegian.)

• Harper Collins German Dictionary (1990) - Apparently this dictionary doesn't cover bird anatomy. I think it might be time for a new German dictionary.

• Cassell's French Dictionary (1978) - gésier, m.

• American Heritage Spanish Dictionary (2000) - molleja.

• McKay's Modern English-Swedish Swedish-English Dictionary (1965) - kräva.

So now you know how to avoid gizzards in many languages, including Middle English! No, really, they were fine - just dense little pieces of meat. Much less freaky than the chicken hearts I had at a Brazilian restaurant on Cape Cod a few years ago, and way less freaky than sweetbreads.

cultural exchange

You probably already know about Engrish, where people like you and me can enjoy the haphazard usage of English words in Japan. But perhaps Hanzi Smatter, "dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture," has escaped your notice. They cover everything, but their main topic is tattoos. Like this one. Which makes no sense.

Seriously. Why would you devote time, money, pain, and eternal skin real estate to something without having an actual Chinese person proofread it first? Or, if you picked Japanese, a Japanese person? Although you can't always tell with these tattoos which language they were going for.

languages

Today I was poking around linguistics sites and discovered that I had never heard of one of the top 10 languages in the world. I find this highly embarrassing. Also, I had no idea Bengali was bigger than Hindi. (This is first languages - they say English would probably be number one if they were counting second languages.)

My linguistic exploration eventually led me to this awesome site: Ethnologue. It's The Giant Repository of languages, and it has this totally cool thing where you can click on a map of the world, pick a country, and get a list of every language spoken in that country.

I checked out the two I'm most familiar with. First, Norway - I figured, ok, there's two official Norwegian languages (Nynorsk and Bokmål) and there's Sami, so that should be three. No - it turns out there are four Sami languages spoken in Norway and three gypsy languages. Then I looked at Japan - thinking, ok, Japanese and Ainu, that should be about it. Yeah. There are like a dozen languages spoken in the island chain that includes Okinawa. Plus Norway and Japan each has its own sign language.

So, basically, there are way more languages than I realized. I always get kind of upset when I read things like this, because I've only learned seven or eight. (I'm defining "learned" as "at some point in my life, have been able to form a sentence in.") I have a lot more to go!

Next I'm thinking about maybe tackling Polish. I'm thinking about going to Poland for my Ridiculous 2008 Adventure.