Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Conquering (my ignorance of) German


The optimistic title above, if truth be told, gives little sense of the reality that I remain largely ignorant of the German language today. That does not mean that I have not acquired a great deal of vocabulary. I learned much German during my five months, but little grammar. Still I have acquired a foundation of knowledge, however thin, and upon that foundation I intend to build.

The translation of the German in the podcast is:

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. I loved my time in Germany. I am happy to be back in the USA. The students there spoke English while I spoke no German. That's all for today. Thank you very much and see you later.

Of course I could speak a whole raft of phrases and learned the numbers to 10,000 and beyond. Complete (and grammatically-correct) sentences represent my next frontier. But it is highly rewarding to speak to Germans who knew less of my language than I knew of theirs-- and to get by. That happened from time to time and to a growing degree as the Fulbright experience went on.

So here is the vodcast on "conquering the German language."

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home