eller | Snowflake Challenge #4

This is Snowflake Challenge #4, "In your own space, create some goals." Sure. I have some personal goals for 2021 (beyond the professional ones, which I'm not going to talk about here)! None of these plans are new, precisely, but it's the first time I compile them like this.

- Raise my online chess rating by at least 150 points. That one is going to be hard because I'm already at a level where the progress of gaining playing strength goes sloooooooowly, but hey, I'm still stuck at home, so it's not as if I'd ever get a better opportunity to do some ambitious training. Also, once tournaments start again, I want to raise my real-life rating... As soon as I get the opportunity.

- Survive Chocolate Box. XD I'm still a bit nervous about that - but haven't deleted my signup. I'm being very brave, ahahahaha! Also, there are at least two prompts I desperately want to write whether I match to the prompters in question or not.

- Find a way to make shadow theater videos that don't look too crappy. (My first attempts were too horrible to show anywhere.)

- Get myself a new Celtic harp so I can play again. Also: play the piano more often. I've neglected my music a bit, but I miss it.

- Do proper High German (and maybe also English) translations of some folk songs that are originally in Platt (Low German) - I know no one cares, but hey, I feel someone should do it.

- Render at least one of my stories from my project-thingy as a coherent comic. If that fails: at least do more proper illustrations.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

As a native speaker of English, I have to deploy a dictionary, my entire lifetime and as many of the sciences and arts I can bring to bear to English. Because it's three languages wrapped in a writ of privateering. ;)

I have used School House Rock to remediate people's lacks for Grammar Tests (sadly, I wander keys and commit other auditory offenses.) America doesn't really teach grammar until Foreign Languages. Which can be High School.

Naturally, the very well off can buy 'enrichment'.

Relearning German happens to be part of my #4: Goals for Snowflake. (I had four years of HS German, which roughly is four semesters of college German. That was last century.)

From:

eller

Fortunately, learning languages is easy these days: the internet is wiiiiiide, and international. :D Er, I mean, it depends on your goals, I suppose. Learning how to talk to random people? Easy. Learning how to talk properly, like an intellectual? Very difficult.

Ugh, grammar. Grammar is evil. I missed too much school to be good at that. XDDD If I had been a diligent student, I should have mastered Latin, English and French. Latin, I learned. The others, not so much.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

I don't talk to random people. Random fen, random intellectuals, specialists in their own fields, yes.

Grammar in English is learnt by dialect immersion; English 'grammar' was Latin's grammar proscriptively stretched over like a map on other terrain.

German would mostly be for reading and maybe eventually writing, since I have no further travel plans.

From:

eller

Ah, but talking to "normal" people will teach you more languages! XD And, I mean, I've talked to German linguists (...yes, about old poetry... LOL) and had to laugh sooooooo hard when I realized that none of them were able to read fluently in Middle High German, which they were supposed to study. The funny thing is that many of the "old" language versions have survived with only minor changes - in local dialects. Which are spoken exclusively by lower-class non-intellectuals, and actively avoided by higher-status individuals. Which... ironically puts children of academics at a disadvantage when it comes to developing a sense of the German language.

Reading modern German should be easy to re-learn for you; German and English are almost identical anyway. Same structure and similar words.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

See, we didn't hear contextual German when I learned, not until very late. (We eventually got to see a detective show.) Also, English doesn't use gender to tell what case things are in; we didn't know that Dative was going to turn all the articles against us.

Ich bin Berliner. Ich bin einen Berliner. I don't know if I've got the right indefinite article to become the jelly doughnut. It's much worse with all the feminine that suddenly in the dative have der. I don't remember the rules to reconstitute the verbs that are irregular. Or, the conditional/helping constructions.

Now in English, I know how to shift my vocabulary and change my speed so I'm still precise but without talking down. I can do it on the fly if the other person isn't assuming I'm in bad faith.

From:

eller

Contextual language generally doesn't appear (or appears too late, anyway) in language classes, which makes language classes pretty useless.

Ich bin eine Berlinerin! (No, I'm not. But at least I'm female, which of course changes everything. Grammatically speaking.) Otherwise I'd have to say, ich bin ein Berliner.

Funny: I don't remember the rules for irregular verbs, either. I'm just using them somehow.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

What, can one no longer distinguish between being a metaphorical denizen of Berlin and a jelly doughnut? Has German changed that much in the elapsed time? (Okay, I get that the scharfes S was fiated away, but that was a ligature not language.)

(Lotfi was very good at telling us not to trust the professor too much; but I didn't have the opportunity to continue that language. And, I was horrid at learning vocabulary. The course was fine up to that. Yes, vocabulary was backloaded in a first section of a language. We'd been learning sounds and orthography because it wasn't Latin alphabet.)

I can still conceptualize about Kartofflesalat but it's not like I've a lot of use for baby sentences about hairdresser training.

From:

eller

I don't think you could ever distinguish, at least not in High German. The gender and articles are the same. In most Southern-German dialects, the "jelly doughnut" (an interesting definition, by the way: I always thought a doughnut is required by design to be ring-shaped?!?) is called "Krapfen", which makes it easier to distinguish food from human beings.

Hairdresser training. O_O Not the first thing I learn in foreign languages, either. (Usually, that's figuring out how to order a beer. First things first!)

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

Ah. Well, here's a factoid from The History File.

John FitzGerald Kennedy, President of the USA (assassinated in 1963) visited Berlin because West Germany was A Thing. To the good people of Berlin, they have a filled doughnut called Berliner. (Doughnuts come in both cake and fried and while they have to be round, the hole is not obligatory but selling the donut holes is when there are punched doughnuts in play. Mini doughnuts have a pierce but no resulting sphere of dough.) And when you say "I am a Berliner" that's a jelly doughnut you've claimed to be. "I am Berliner" would be the styling, though in their dialect of German. Now, since it's a historical sentence, and we accept JFK as a man using those pronouns and grammar for languages gendered (as opposed to ones that prefer relative age in sibling cohorts) I have no need to have stowed a female person's ending. Unlike all of the professions.

In the recesses of the latter 20th century, text book series roamed the land, and that meant there were Characters that had photographed German young people, one was going to an Arbeitschulen and another to Gymnasium (I can't recall spelling and I'm not fighting my spellcheck about Not English) This allowed each testable section to have a through line, like "We're going hiking and we need to take food to eat looking at the edelweiss". Language lab had cassette tapes so we could parrot what we heard. (No part of this is sound language learning, and I'm Very Bad At Learning Languages.)

So, we do that series for, two or three years and then we're reading Brecht. Not actually reading, since when I read I don't have to consult a dictionary every third word, but yeah, that's why my German is only understandable in Italy. And time has marched on. We did write sentences too, but we couldn't write outside of the vocabulary and there's nothing natural about "I have never been in a German store and I have seen a few photos and I'm writing sentences about Kartofelsalat."

From:

eller

I'm aware of the historical quote. ^^ The language thing, though, isn't entirely correct. It's true that "Ich bin Berliner" exclusively refers to being a denizen of Berlin. But "Ich bin ein Berliner" can actually mean both, so Kennedy's grammar was perfectly fine. ;) Just like "Ich bin ein Hamburger" can refer to someone living in Hamburg or, yes, a hamburger. There are jokes about that particular ambiguity.

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

Aw. Well, better to learn that here than somewhere else. Without a footnote, it didn't happen. The footnote needs one too.

English is rife with ambiguity. Which is horrible when people that don't know shading in language micromanage.

From:

eller

For footnotes, see Terry Pratchett, who was the best at footnotes. ;)

German is complicated, because a) ambiguity is fun, and b) there's about 200 different dialects, and c) no, they don't all understand each other somehow. They're so different from each other that I managed to pick up some English like another German dialect because, hey, it has the same roots as all the others. Theoretically, everyone should speak High German, but, uh. In practice, it looks a bit different. (There are lots of inner-German racist jokes about the other tribes and their unintellegible, barbaric languages.)

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

Yes. I was speaking of them in their weight bearing sense, as in the humanities and social sciences, they're a handy dandy
tool. Defense, offense, carries water--

I'm aware that no, they are significantly different. So, I didn't take it personal my German was nonsense in Vienna. And yes, the format of certain jibes Indistinguishable and just as lethal. It's why I really hate that "ginger jokes" have made it from Great Britain to the US. They are EXACT, and phonetically too close even if they weren't. It's bad enough we've got broken from context vaudeville jokes like "red-headed stepchild". (Which usually have a cloud of jokes because that was the point. Memes without wires.)