I have chapterized it as well for easy listening.
Where
I am in Germany. At the moment I live in Bielefeld in my dad’s sparse but sleekchic white and blue house—the former family house that he grew up in and which I remember from visits in my childhood—on Karolinenstrasse. The burst of autumn reds and golds is unfortunately just at its end and the last few burning leaves cling shivering on the birch trees, or release sighing to the damp grass.
Why
TBD
What
I have been attending a german class, german for foreign speakers. My classmates are two men from korea, one from taiwan (Strangely all three seem to be pastors and married with children) none of them have names which I (or anyone else, including the teacher) can correctly remember or pronounce. This is shameful, i know. Then there is Ding Ding, a woman from Shanghai. Ossman a Turkish guy with a good sense of humor, Raoul from the D. R. who never stops grinning but also never comes to class, and three Russians, Euvgeny, Tania and Olga. The girls are both early twenties, bleach-blonded and super nice.
It’s strange and disorienting for me to learn geman as a foreign language in this class setting. when you learn something from the ground up, there’s the understanding that you don’t know anything and of course things will be frustrating. You can also add elements one at a time so that, hopefully a semi-sensible structure will emerge. But I am, and have been, already ‘in’ german. I speak it, however bumblingly, my accent is undetectable so that most people assume I am native right away. I can read and I understand most of everything that people say. But when it comes down to writing, I actually have no academic or instinctual sense of when to use what article and why.
Der, Die, Das,…(small tangent on german grammar)
In german, nouns are gendered, and not just male/female but neuter as well. The system of gender has nothing to do with logic, with culture, or even with word ending. There are generalities but always exceptions. It’s the (she) fork, (he) spoon, (it) knife. It’s the (she) city, (he) land, (it) village. It’s the (she) wall, (he) graveyard, (it) mausoleum.
The problem continues because the articles decline, that is, they change according to the case of the noun. If I am looking at the (der) mann, then he is not ‘der’ mann, but ‘den’ mann. And if I am showing something to the man then he is ‘dem’ mann. And if I am taking something that is the man’s (of the man) then it is ‘des manns’. The theory behind all these changes might be familiar, as it should be to anyone who has tried to learn Latin or any latinate language but the actual implementation, on the other hand, takes training. For which I find it hard to have patience. Oh yeah, not only that, but adjectives change in the same way, and even prepositions take certain cases.
Anyway, this is probably boring but I could chatter forever about it, so, onward to the next subject.
Who
This is me now, somewhat. I am somewhere in the middle of being German and American. I am sort of a student at the Bielefeld university. I have been sort of productive cooking pumpkin soup and baking lots of pies with the thousands of apples we have picked around the roof.
Whom
I spend a lot of time with my rugby team, which is not exactly my rugby team because there is only officially men’s rugby here, so though we are trying to start a women’s club for the time being I train with them. There is one other girl, Anne-Marie who comes regularly and now Sandra, married to one of the players, is going to show up, but there have been quite a few trainings where it was just me and, well, a bunch of people considerably larger and male-er than me. This, as you can imagine, leads to some interesting situations as we all try to navigate the gender (and size) dynamics of co-ed rugby.
Ok, that’s a general outline. Now i promise promise to try and actually (small things) at least once a week.
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