Wednesday, May 29, 2013

What's German for 'With a Happy Ending?'

So as I have mentioned previously, I've been learning German through an audio CD course. 

(Look - if they had one for Hungarian, I'd be learning that.  Cut me some slack here.)

Ahem.  As I was saying - I've been learning German through an audio course, which is all well and good, but lately something sinister has been sneaking into the lessons.  We've reached the point where they are teaching us how to discuss having learned something. 

The first few lessons about this were along the lines of:

"It is not easy to learn German" (A statement to whose veracity I can attest), 

However, now suddenly we are being coached to say:

"I Learned German through a <Expurgated> Course.  It was very easy!'

The expurgated word is of course the name of the company whose CD set I am using to learn the language.

And they didn't just have us say this once.  We were drilled on this exact phrase literally twenty or thirty times over the course of the lesson.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't take particularly kindly to being pimped out as a billboard for the good folks at <expurgated>, I don't care how effective their language lessons are.

And so, because I didn't feel the need to program myself to be their bitch, but did still want to learn past-perfect tense structure, I just started substituting other places I might have learned German from.

Eventually I settled on 'Knife wielding prostitute'

Ich habe Deutsch von einem 'Knife Weilding Prostitute' gelernt
(In case you were wondering)

I have to throw the English phrase in the middle there, as the good people at <expurgated> have - perhaps unsurprisingly - not yet covered the vocabulary for either knife wielding or prostitution. 
And after a few days of repeating this it occurred to me what a shockingly good method of language instruction that would actually be.  I mean, talk about carrot and stick.  No pun intended.

Your sobbing screams for mercy better have noun-verb agreement, pal!

As a side note, my google search for images of 'knife wielding prostitute' turned up some exceedingly strange results.  For example it's not entirely clear to me if that's a man or a woman in the picture, but it did showcase the knife wielding satisfactorily, which it turns out is harder to find than one might imagine.

Also, I wonder at what point the FBI starts keeping track of your internet search history.

-Vizlsa out

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