I’m not feeling particularly inspired to write anything here. I think I’m getting sick. My throat has been sore for a few days and I’m feeling woozy. I’m going to attempt to tutor Detlef’s stepson in English. I’ve never done that before. I think he just has some trouble conjugating verbs. Maybe I’ll just ask him what are some of his favorite songs with English lyrics and we’ll go through them and I’ll explain the meaning. I wonder if he listens to lots of American hip hop like other kids. Poppin caps, bling bling, blowin trees and gittin jiggy might not translate to well into German. I can tell him what they mean but I might not be able to say why.
It might be hard for me to teach English even though I understand it. As a native English speaker I just don’t know why I understand it. Native German speakers can understand and speak the language way better than me but I can tell them things about German many of them never knew. For example all German nouns that end with -keit and -heit (Krankheit, Gesundheit) are feminine. All nouns ending with -chen (Brötchen, Mädchen) are neutral. All nouns ending with -ismus are masculine. Even the word “Feminismus” which means “Feminism” is masculine. Krass, oder? So when I tell some Germans that they have to stop and think about it because they never noticed it before. I find this interesting because the gender of a noun can have an influence on other words and meanings in a sentence all depending on the case and article. I have to stop and think about it often mid-sentence as I’m speaking but native speakers can just spit it out without having to think about it. But it is just the opposite when they speak English with me sometimes. In German the secondary verb comes at the end of the sentence. Sometimes if I formulate a super long complicated German sentence with all kinds of fancy verbiage, I have to stop and think at the end of the sentence because I forgot what verb I wanted to use. For example. Ich will zum Laden gehen. If I translated it back into English but kept the German word order it would look like: I want to the store to go. This is because German was invented by an ancient race of small green yodas that used to inhabit the central European plains.