The Road to the Mastery of a Foreign Language.
Der Weg zur Beherrschung einer Fremdsprache.
Making progress in a foreign language can seem very difficult. Almost no one advocates being either bilingual or a polyglot, and finding someone who is such from whom to learn or with whom you can talk is nearly impossible. The Spanish language has a lot going for it, for obvious reasons, as it is widely taught, and many native speakers abound. Other languages, even French (with Canada so near), are much more difficult to find help and company to assist in learning. Books, CDs and such are available, but we need more than just tools to learn a language - we need people. People are the sole reason to speak any language. For myself, my determination and passion are my driving forces, and they are paying off. If I can utilize both that and my experience and know-how in the German language to teach or help ANYBODY any aspect of it, should they desire to know, that would be wonderful.
After much determination and a long time of working hard, I finally am able to write complex German sentences. Once the pieces fell together, and I saw how it's supposed to work, I had a hard time understanding why I hadn't realized it sooner. It's difficult to explain exactly what I was doing wrong, as I get it now. I'm beginning to see that in learning how to improvise and pick up new scales on Guitar too - one of the tricks is you just have to keep pushing and pushing, working and working, see it through, and never stop. You have to make the mistakes to find out what works. You quickly begin to learn what doesn't work, what not to waste your time on, and you whittle it down to that which does. But this can take quite a while, depending on how advanced one wishes to become, so it always helps to have a guiding hand from someone who has experience. You can't put a price on experience. I happen to have the focus, because of my internal drive to become fluent in German, to push through the muck. Trust me, as in both arenas, if you keep pushing long enough, and with enough dedication, the pay-off is huge, as you get what you were looking for. But perhaps there are those who need a little guiding, a little incentive, to keep moving. It's easy to become dissuaded or uninterested. That's probably part of why it's taken me so long to get anywhere substantial in it, as finding those who speak it, or are even more than trivially interested in it, is very difficult (imagine when I get to Russian). If you don't use it, you lose it, and I incorporate German in my life every day, in song lyrics, journal entries, and other things, to keep its presence in my life. Otherwise, like an un-watered tree, it will wither and fade away.
For those who wish to learn more than one language, once you get past the barriers of the first new foreign language, the second (or third, or whatever) becomes loads easier. That's because one hardly ever looks at their mother tongue the way they have to approach a new language, because they were immersed in it from the get-go, and got grammar lessons and examples pounded at them daily. They simply had to learn it, if they wanted to communicate with anybody. A foreign language is a different case. Sometimes you have to artificially create the situation (as in my case). In Europe, many people know more than one language, simply due to the proximity of so many different countries.
I will translate this soon.
I have always been interested in Astronomy, and lately I finally started doing something about it. A couple of weeks ago I started learning the constellations (not done yet), and I can now locate Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn in the night sky. Mercury is too close to the sun to see right now (and when you can view it, it's very fleeting and tricky), and, obviously, Uranus and Neptune are just too far away. The night I first found Jupiter and its four Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) in my binoculars (they are visible as 3-4 tiny dots of light right next to Jupiter, depending on their position in orbit), I was ecstatic. It was literally the coolest thing that has happened to me in a long time. Suddenly, the Solar System didn't seem so big and far away anymore. Then, a couple nights later, I was able to find the Andromeda Galaxy (the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, but not the closest galaxy) in my binoculars. It's a faint disc, but you can definitely tell it's a galaxy. I also located Rho Cassiopeiae, a yellow hypergiant (one of the biggest known in the galaxy) star 11,650 light years away in the constellation, you guessed it, Cassiopeia. It's been exhibiting some violent behavior in recent decades, and astronomers concede that it either will soon, or might possibly already have, gone supernova. Eta Carina is another such star (~7,500 light years away), but it isn't viewable north of 30 degrees latitude (about Houston, TX). It is also, in low-light pollution areas, very easy to see the arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, and Galactic Center (which is not visible, at least in visible light, due to massive amounts of dust between us and it), which is in the constellation Sagittarius.
They say the Universe is a massively super-big place (duh). Scientists have looked so deep into parts of it that they have literally seen light that has been traveling towards us since near the beginning of it. Having found the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away, suddenly, the Universe seems much smaller and closer to me than ever before. This is bound to change even more, as I find more celestial objects. The awe, humility, and grandeur I feel knowing this, and other such things, really makes me feel exhilarated. I oftentimes feel like I'm in the greatest laboratory ever made, lucky to have evolved, as all humans have, to be able to appreciate this wonderful place. Like Carl Sagan might say, we are literally star dust contemplating the Universe. How marvelous.
Meine Hobbys sind sehr zahlreich. Es gibt viele Dinge, daß mich interessiert. Natürlich ist die deutsche Sprache ein solches Hobby. Auch ist Russich. Jetzt studiere ich die russiche Sprache, um es zu lernen. Ich kann deutsch ein bißchen gut verwenden, aber ich muß es mehr üben. Die Philosophie und die Wissenschaft sind meine zwei tiefeste Leidenschaften. Jeden Tag denke ich über viele Sachen nach, einschließlich meiner Platz in der Welt, in dem Universum. Die Wissenschaft enthält alle die Antworten für meinen Fragen, über warum das Universum (die Erde auch, und mehr) ist wie es ist. Die Philosophie hilft ein bißchen auch damit (selsbtverständlich ist die Wissenschaft 'ne Philosophie!). Die Hauptstudienfächer für mich sind Astronomie, Kosmologie, Biologie, Quantenmechanik. Zurzeit habe ich viel Lust, die regionale Pflanze zu bezeichnen. Ich weiß fast nichts über die lokale Flora.
Ich bin eine Musiker und eine Liedermacher. Ich spiele und schreibe gern Instrumentalmusik, Heavymetalmusik, Rockmusik, sanfter Musik und klassiche Musik. Ich bin darin sehr eklektisch. Ich schreibe auch Liedtexte und singe, wie gut ich kann (ich bin kein Sammy Hagar).
In puncto Aktivitäten fahre ich mein Rad gern, schwimme (nur selten, aber ich mag es gern), spiele Racquetball, Tennis und Disc Golf gern (mehr selten).
Bislang falle mir nicht mehr ein.
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