The better I get at German (and of course I'm still awful), the more I'm falling in love with this language. It's not always beautiful just to listen to, the way Italian is, and because of this I never loved it before. Before I only studied the sounds. Now I'm studying the vocabulary and the structure (a little), and it's so poetic. I can well believe that so many fairy tales come from this land, with its deep, dark woods and it's magic-making tongue. Some days I think I may have stumbled into a fairy tale myself.
Specifically, I love the compound words in German. The other day I was sitting at the Kaffee Momo (a coffee roaster and cafe that reminds me of all my favorite coffeeshops at home, including a wall full of books for patrons to read. I was so thrilled to see all that new reading material and then I remembered that I don't read German yet...), working on my Wolf Lieder translations. I came across this word: ahnungsvoll. By itself it wasn't in my dictionary, but when I broke it down I found it. It is Ahnung: foreshadowing, presentiment, plus voll: full. Literally, foreshadowings-full. Maybe German speakers don't notice this the way a non-native speaker does, because of course they just know what the word means. But to me, it is so beautiful and poetic--and so many words use this kind of word-architecture to build meanings from root words.
We only have two weeks more here. I'm so sad when I think about going back to a place where everyone speaks English all the time. Of course I speak English with the other Americans here, and with the Germans who speak English, but I love hanging out with the Germans when they speak to each other in German. I understand much better when people are talking to me, but I love to listen and try to understand. I'm starting to feel like I could be conversing in German if I could stay just one more month or so.
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