8 June 26
Lieblingsautoren
I’ve been a member of an advanced German conversation group for several years, run through International House Davis. A year or so into it our leader got ill and was no longer able to run the group, which had been meeting on zoom since the start of the pandemic. Given that several of our members lived outside of Davis, we carried on with zoom. Since Paul’s death I’ve been running the zooms, though not necessarily leading the group (though by default that seems to have happened).
One exercise that is very useful when learning a language is to write in it. Dictionaries are ok but it’s really helpful to write down what you might say to someone in conversation, with a bit more time to think about it than on the spot. As humans, once we have the basics of a language under our belts, we are adept at finding ways around a problem, a word, a concept we can’t quite bring to the tip of our tongue in a hurry. So it is with writing — we have a little more time to cogitate on what we want to say, and even ponder the more direct way to say it.
Our exercise for this week is to write a paragraph about our favorite author. This is a tough one for me — I have several favorite authors, some of them fantasy writers, some of them graphic novelists, some of them nature writers, some of them even knitters. The problem is compounded when I have to figure out how I can convey this in German (I have already made a presentation on knitting in German to this group and I’m going to bow out of that particular niche). More anon.
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