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Since weaning off my pain meds there have been a fair number of changes to the stuff I do in a day, the TV is pretty much never on, I’ve been listening to music damn near all the time, I’ve been outside more and overall crafting less. Don’t worry boys and girls, I doubt the need to make stuff will ever totally leave me.

One of those new changes has been I pick my German back up again. After everything started to fall apart I sort of set it aside, I hadn’t given up on the thought of it, but just generally couldn’t be bothered. Almost like a switch had been thrown I just had the sudden desire to do it again, only somewhat more… obsessively I guess than before.

We are only talking something like a month and a half, maybe two here, but it’s weird because it almost feels like I didn’t stop the first time. Yes, I have forgotten a handful of things, but apparently not just, which means those building blocks were still just sitting there and waiting for me and now it feels faster somehow.

Obviously I’m still at the very very early phase, but some weird freaking stuff apparently starts happening in your brain when you bury yourself in it, thank god I have a friend to tell me it’s not all just me.

What weird stuff? My spelling, which was never strong to begin with, has taken a hit. I’ll either just sit with a freaking blank on words I know I know, will try to spell it germanically or only be able to think of the damn German word. The other day I got stuck on poison, which normally I can spell. I just couldn’t get past the ‘‘P” and “gift” which is, believe it or not the German word, was the only damned thing that would come to mind. I had to go look it up, I nearly reverse looked it up, by that I mean just go look up the meaning of “gift”. Actually I almost typed in “gift” when I started this segment out. It’s like a freaking mental log jam.

I actually had a dream partially in German, a weird patchy dream, but it did bring me a word I had forgotten and was driving me crazy to try and remember. When I asked if that was weird, my friend said “I was wondering when that would start happening to you.” LOL

The other day I finished working on some German and decided to come inside and ask K about some fruit, but first my brain my brain decided to think in German first… what stopped me wasn’t the fact I was constructing (a very very simple) sentence in German, it’s that the first word that popped in my head was “frucht” which I learned last time around, but I’d just recently come across the word “obst” for fruit. That’s what stopped me, the word confusion. That’s actually how the poison log jam happened because I was clarifying the difference between them with my friend. Yeah, note to self, maybe don’t ask german language questions of a german right after studying.

This time around I realized that I spent the last 14 bloody years effectively hearing the german R incorrectly. I’d always heard it sort of rolled like you would in spanish, I think my brain just went “oh yeah that’s rolled you can’t do that”. It isn’t. The damned Germans decided they wanted to be unique, and their R is actually formed in the back of the throat like they form a lot of the sounds I think most people associate with german. Wtf?! I was actually looking up how to train yourself to roll your Rs and discovered all the sites that had directions left German off the list of languages with a rolled R. So I decided to look up very specifically how to learn a german R, and the direction were totally different. What the hell, I thought, that can’t be right. So back to Youtube I go to pull up a couple of my favorite german bands. Goddamn it, I’d been hearing it wrong. That’s not the first time I realized I was hearing something wrong in German, I just didn’t expect to hear something new now. Silly me.

Remember I said “effectively hearing the german R wrong”, the thing that doesn’t make it a clean sweap, so to speak, is the fact that I had indeed been hearing it, and even sometimes singing it correctly, just in places where I didn’t think there was an R. Yes singing, yes that means I sing stuff in languages I don’t understand, and German isn’t the only one. A, I just like singing, and B, if you take enough chorus, you’ll end up singing songs not in English.

Now, the good news about this is I know I can learn how to make this R, since I can make, or more or less make the other throaty sounds. I never had much luck rolling my Rs, best I could do was sing a tripped one. The bad news is it means I have to force myself to relearn how to say some stuff in German that I’ve been saying wrong for years. But I’m determined, and have actually blown my voice out a few days practicing.

Why all the german R talk? Last night in the shower I was singing part of a song that I think is in Portuguese , it sounds kind of spanish-y, but isn’t. I’ve had this song for at least a year and while I can’t sing most of it, there are parts I’ve been singing for a long time. I’m singing and suddenly without thought on my part, a word with an R in it came out German sounding. I giggled and continued… and it happened a second time, which made me laugh. I can’t win for loosing.

But I am enjoying learning German, even when it’s annoying or hard as hell, and it is hard as hell. No kidding, most days I probably do or watch about 3-4 hours of something German. Videos, movies, ext. That’s not counting the fact that a large amount of my music is German right now. Short of finding a way to move to Germany for a little while, that’s probably the best I can do. However I am glad to have the desire to do it back again, even if it’s kicked in like crazy.