Okay, fine, Anne. I read your blog, and I guess that is something that I have been wanting to talk about. Inspiration? I think so.
Did you know I am actually pretty productive? Like I go and study (or I try to!) two times a week? I guess I just might have to convince you: Anne and I recently started this new routine where every Monday afternoon, both of us get out a period early so Anne gets on a bus to Aachen, and I run home to grab some food. A snack for two, which Anne reminds me of my weirdness considering I’ve showed up with fruit, shrimp kebabs, PB&J sandwiches, yogurt with spoons, and cookies. We eat outside on a park bench or on the grass, enjoying the good weather as we tell each other about our weekends and what we’ve missed.
Still talking, we take three escalators up to the very top floor where the subject matter changes to “Hey, is this the book we decided we liked?” “Were you finished with the Slang book?” “Make sure you grab both the dictionaries!” We both take our piles of books to a study carrel and pull out our notebooks before switching them. Then the sentences change again:
“Uhmmm… thorough?”
“Wait… give me a second! … Sorgfältig!”
“Hey, that was pretty good!”
“Yeah, I studied in the bus,” admitted with a sheepish smile.
“To look for, to long for”
“Sich sehnen!”
We go through our lists of vocabulary words, helping each other remember the more difficult ones and seeing how much we learned. Last week, we both sat there astounded at the impact of the words we had learned. How could people have used those words so many times, and I never thought twice about what it meant or questioned them? I thought I always understood everything, but I’ve heard this word at least 32 times today and I never knew it before? It’s pretty hard to imagine.
Then we do the next step: find more new words to learn. We pull out what is considered a “Basic Dictionary” and go through page by page, quizzing each other on new random words. If you don’t know the word, write it down and be expected to know it next week. Easy enough. Now, I can welcome a long list of new words into my vocabulary such as: großzügig, zart, heiter, sich sehnen. Words that I had heard so many times and never really thought about what they mean.
Plus, the best part of it all is to watch passerby-ers stop at the peculiarity of our conversation where we’ll switch from German to English 6 times in one sentence, not thinking twice about the fact that I just said “obwohl” and “ich denke” directly after “yesterday afternoon” and “great.”
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