This weekend I discovered my perfect German audience: three-year-old girls. I was reading a book to the daughter of a friend of a friend about some animals putting on a show. I didn’t quite get the pronunciation of the word for “stage” right, and she corrected me. With my deft foreign-language punning skills, I launched into a discussion of whether we were having stages or beans (they kind of sound alike) for dinner. It was clearly the funniest thing she had heard all day. Possibly in her whole life.
I also had a nice long chat about dinosaurs with a five-year-old boy. I didn’t catch all of it, but I did learn that they were bigger than a car. Best thing about talking to kids: they don’t get embarrassed when you mangle a sentence so badly that it’s unintelligible. They say “What?” so you know to try again.
So, as long as I don’t have to talk to or write for anyone over the age of six, I think I’m ok.
Here’s the story I was talking about yesterday. Yeah, it’s in German. Google Translator actually does a pretty good job with it – select German to English, paste the URL in the box, and it’ll show you the page in English.
Extra fun – you can scroll down and read the comments. Ah, newspaper comment sections. They’re juvenile and abusive everywhere in the world. Actually, most of these are kinda funny, and only one person swore he’s deleting the link from his computer and never reading Die Welt again. He was apparently upset that this “revolution and milestone in the research” did not get the appreciation it deserves.
Yeah…I’m not sure “revolution” and “milestone” are the right words for this study. I’d classify it as “pretty neat.” The whole idea of building telescopes in Antarctica is totally awesome, but it’s not new. This is just one more suggestion about a good place to put them.
Today I wrote my first story in German! Ok, actually my second story in German. I wrote a little tiny story last week at Bild, but something went tragically wrong and it didn’t get published. But today’s story went into a layout and went to the presses and will be in newspapers tomorrow! Real live newspapers! Which, apparently, people in Germany still read.
The edit went a lot better than you’d think, considering German is not my best language. It’s not even in my top three. In the first go-round, the editor corrected my grammar (which wasn’t *too* bad, but I’d guessed some genders wrong and messed up some cases) and fixed the two or three expressions that made no sense. I made the corrections, and then he went through and did an edit that was a bit more rewritey while I watched over his shoulder and suggested alternate phrasings and the intern at the next desk looked up words on Leo. In the final version, I still know what all the words mean, and it still ends with something funny I thought up. (My other funny was cut for space. Sigh.)
The editor and I bonded over our mutual love of the letter ß. It was taken out of a lot of German words in the spelling reform of 1996, presumably because it’s weird and people who don’t speak German don’t know what to do when it shows up in a text. It’s called the “eszett” and it makes an “s” sound. I’d used it to write the word “daß,” because cmon, there’s a ß key right on my keyboard, and that’s how I learned to spell “daß” in 1990, and besides, I love that letter. But the spellcheck on his computer caught it and he replaced it with “ss,” and we had a little grumble about it.
The people at Die Welt still seem to think I speak German. I suspect that I actually speak a unique hybrid of German, Norwegian, and German-accented English. But they keep speaking German to me, so I keep speaking my mishmash, and everyone seems happy.
