Coffee from a Cardboard Cup

Generally, I complain a lot about learning German, as the women here who commiserate with me can attest to. But once in a while, the language makes me smile. Here’s a great sentence from the second Harry Potter book.

Er hat “grosse, fledermausauhnliche Ohren und hervorquellende gruene Augaupfel, so gross wie Tennisbaelle.” (As some of you may have guessed, Harry just met Dobby)

I think this means, “He had bat-like ears and sticky-outy green apple-eyes as big as tennis balls.” I think the funniest word here is Fledermaus = bat. I can’t figure out what fleder means, but Maus = mouse. So, in my mind, Fledermaus means flying or flapping or leathery mouse. What a great description of a bat! Granted, that may not be the right translation, but half of my German is made up anyway. I sometimes have conversations with strangers, and I only understand the general idea of what was said; the rest is created with a little imagination and wishful thinking. I find I enjoy life as an illiterate forgeiner better that way.

The bat reminds me of the word for slug which translates to NAKED SNAIL (Sarah tipped me off to that one). That’s another awesome one. It seems that only these useless, funny words and sentences stick in my head.

Here’s another keeper from the same chapter: “Boeser Dobby!” It means ‘Bad Dobby,’ and I already new that boese = bad. The thing I learned from this little gem is that boese becomes boeser when you call someone bad. It’s one of the many German grammatical things I don’t ever expect to understand (as I never actually learned English grammer properly), but at least when Matthias annoys me now, I can say “Boeser Matthias!” and be grammatically correct. He seems to enjoy it when I find stupid little German sentences like that and use them appropriately.

I got home late last night after an exhausting day running around Munich (more descirpion of this adventure in the next post). Usually when I am so tired, new ideas pop out of my head, and last night, I had one.

Sarah gave me a book called “Julie & Julia,” and I opened it for the first time last night. It is a book about a woman (Julie – someone I suspect Sarah migth relate to, just a bit!) going through a tough time in her life, and she decides that she is going to prepare every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and write a blog about it. So far, it’s a funny story.

So, as I am not used to this whole blog thing, I don’t think of posting on the meaningless little advantures in my life. However, upon reflection and inspirtation from Julie, I realized that the things I sometimes see as ‘meaningless adventures’ in life are often the events that later seem important. So I should take the time to report upon another little life project that I am taking on.

Two days ago, I finished reading the first Harry Potter book auf Deutsch (in German). As some of you might know, I have read all of the books in English, let’s say, more than once. I figured the first book would be a good lesson in German as I know the story line so well.

Upon completing the book, I realize that not much of the German has stuck in my head, though I was able to follow the story with limited excursions to the dictionary. I am not sure exactly how my brain did that, but now I am convinced that if I can read all of the Harry Potter books in German, my brain will figure out the language or at least I will learn a few new phrases.

I had hoped that upon reading the first book, I would have learned a ton of new words. However, if you were to ask me to tell you what I learned without looking in the book for reference, this is what I would tell you.

• dei Narbe = the scar
• merkwuerdig = odd
• bemerkt = noticed
• zucken = twitch
• Mut = courage
• Du hast nicht genug Tassen in deinen Schrank. = You don’t have enough cups in your cuboard (A German iddium – my new phrase)
• Ich werde nicht mit ihr Kirschen essen = I wouldn’t eat cherries with her (another great iddium)

After an entire book, that’s about all that stuck in my head – not very impressive. Seven is a lucky number, so I’ll take it as a positive indicator. I did take the approach of not looking up words unless I really can’t figure them out. As a result, there were entire scenes in the book that I didn’t figure out until they were over. I hope the rest of the new words are just sitting in my brain rippening. Sometimes my brain works that way, but it seems to have gotten me this far, so I am not complaining.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress of book II which I plan to buy today.