I'm still hacking away at the German. It's coming along OK. I even tried to write a German blog post last night, but was continually hampered by an inadequate command of the grammar. German grammar is the most difficult of any language I have ever tried. If you're thinking Asian languages must be harder because they're more exotic, you're totally wrong. Japanese is far easier than German. Or French, for that matter. For one thing, you don't have to remember whether every single noun in the language is a boy or a girl... or in German a he, she or it. A few verbs are a bit irregular, but you never have to learn whole pages of of them. And in no Asian language I have tried did I ever come across the type of information that can only be expressed properly in tabular form ~ inflexions ~ and German is full of them. Inflexional languages are fiendishly difficult ~ Latin being a prime example.
Somehow die Deutsche Sprache is becoming more and more familiar to me. Ever since the connection to my English satellite box broke down I have been deluged by German from the time I get up in the morning to when I sleep at night. I've started testing myself on the reams of vocabulary I've written down but there's too much to remember. But somehow the words I have learned have come in very useful indeed ~ not that you'd think they necessarily were. Eg der Angriff (attack) and die Belagerung (seige) have come up time and time again on documentaries. Language is a small world: twice last night key-words were spoken on the telly at the exact moment I was looking them up for my notebook. When I can finally speak German fluently in the year 2049 I'll let you know. On my blog "Gledwood Volume 329"!!
Link: the German Language ~ bad for your mental health!
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