das gab ein grosses Feuerwerk.

[highways]

This afternoon I was IMing unicorn and thor and I put my head down on my keyboard, and when I picked it up again it was an hour and a half later and after I worked out the what the fuck happened? where the hell am I? I had to go to German. Which is, by the way, Taiwan's one opportunity for me to feel superior, since as much as its grammar might kick my ass on a regular basis, in my class I am the only person who's a native speaker of a Germanic language—except, maybe, the professor, I don't know where she's from—plus English has a vocabulary overlap with German of like, sixty percent. Basically I know more than everyone else in the classroom by doing nothing, studying nothing, just by existing. This makes me feel super smart even though I did nothing to earn it.

In all other circumstances I am an illiterate idiot. One who can segment Chinese, though. Even if I can't understand it any better than I could when I got here three weeks ago, which is frustrating, I know my subconscious is up to something because word boundaries are super obvious to me now, I can recognize other non-native Chinese speakers by their accent, and really the whole language sounds a lot different than it did before.

And writing in English gets harder all the time. This entry? It took me forever, and I know the wording in places is awkward as hell. It's probably because I haven't had an actual face-to-face conversation with another native English speaker in days, but goddamnit, I have been here for three weeks. THREE WEEKS. It's like my brain is all, fuck this, DIVERT RESOURCES, SHE DOESN'T EVEN USE ENGLISH ANYMORE ANYWAY.

Edit: BEHOLD, A FANDOM LINK, "Hey, Inception Fandom. Let's talk about Yusuf for a minute." by effex. Yes, lets. Includes a bunch of fic recs I'll probably check out tomorrow, because tbh he's one of the few characters in that movie with a distinct voice at all. So far I've only really read fic about him actually.

Comments

[jae]

Are you seriously learning German through Chinese? Wild! I've learned one foreign language through another before, but never two languages that were that far apart.

-J

[highways]

Fortunately no! Or unfortunately, depending on your perspective. They voted on the issue on the first day of class, and since it's an elective it's dominated by very motivated language geeks who wanted a chance to practice their second language (English) in order to learn their third or fourth or whatever. And the teacher speaks both Chinese and English equally well and didn't care, and I was honestly pretty relieved.

My classmates still discuss stuff in Chinese though. Sometimes we do that lazy thing where they talk to me in their native language, and I answer in mine, and we all sort of understand each other.

[jae]

Okay, now I'm even more confused. How could they vote on that the first day of class? I mean, wouldn't they have to have long since determined what language, say, the books would be in, or whatever? And surely the teacher had already prepared at least some of the lessons for an entire semester's worth of work!

-J

[highways]

The book is only in German! Which I find sort of frustrating, since I have to then look up all the new words in a different source, but it's probably convenient for the publishing company to ship it internationally to different countries. I think the class was always intended to be taught in English but so were most of the courses I'm taking and like, some of the teachers are either talking in Chinese an awful lot, or have decided that to hell with what it says on the schedule, they're teaching it entirely in Chinese. So this could've gone either way, really.