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tenlittlebullets) wrote2011-01-21 11:37 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2011-01-21 11:37 am
How Rammstein accidentally taught me German
Just told this story on Abaissé, am not sure if I've ever properly posted it to LJ, so here it is for posterity.
I have a sort of hyper-verbal brain that's unusually adept at picking up language structures, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for obvious reasons, a curse because other things like math and music get routed through the verbal parts of my brain too, and so I can't, say, read/write (or even surf the internet) while listening to music or my wires get hopelessly crossed. It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time I could do text/music multitasking (and once upon a time I saw music in color, but that's another story). Then around adolescence it started slowly disappearing. There was a point around when I was fourteen when I could read while listening to music, but only as long as there were no lyrics I could understand.
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
Being fourteen and really into music that made my parents flinch, I was SO DELIGHTED to find Rammstein because it was awesome and I didn't speak a word of German so I could listen to it while I wrote. This continued for... a few weeks maybe? Then I started picking out words that were suspiciously close to English words, and I started getting curious about what was going on in between, so I took the plunge. I looked up the lyrics and the translations of a few of my favorite songs.
German is close enough to English that once I had a translation it was easy to tell which words corresponded to what. This meant all I had to do was go back and listen to those songs some more, and I had a ready-made lesson on pronunciation and a small but useful vocabulary to work with--a handful of nouns and verbs, and most of the common prepositions and pronouns. Then I unofficially got the hang of the word order. Then I started noticing verb conjugations. Then I started noticing that the articles and pronouns changed if they went with a subject, a direct object, or an indirect object. Then I noticed that they seemed to do it irregularly oh my god this does not make sense sometimes they even do different things with the same preposition and went to german.about.com to clear up this URGENT AND LIFE-CHANGING MYSTERY. And it all went downhill from there.
Suffice to say that when I walked into my first day of high school German class, I could no longer multitask while listening to Rammstein, and I could chatter fluently about fire, death, blood, crosses, churchyards, BDSM, and frozen undead children with music boxes in the place of hearts, but I had no idea how to say "Hello, my name is![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
10littlebullets."
I have a sort of hyper-verbal brain that's unusually adept at picking up language structures, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for obvious reasons, a curse because other things like math and music get routed through the verbal parts of my brain too, and so I can't, say, read/write (or even surf the internet) while listening to music or my wires get hopelessly crossed. It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time I could do text/music multitasking (and once upon a time I saw music in color, but that's another story). Then around adolescence it started slowly disappearing. There was a point around when I was fourteen when I could read while listening to music, but only as long as there were no lyrics I could understand.
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
Being fourteen and really into music that made my parents flinch, I was SO DELIGHTED to find Rammstein because it was awesome and I didn't speak a word of German so I could listen to it while I wrote. This continued for... a few weeks maybe? Then I started picking out words that were suspiciously close to English words, and I started getting curious about what was going on in between, so I took the plunge. I looked up the lyrics and the translations of a few of my favorite songs.
German is close enough to English that once I had a translation it was easy to tell which words corresponded to what. This meant all I had to do was go back and listen to those songs some more, and I had a ready-made lesson on pronunciation and a small but useful vocabulary to work with--a handful of nouns and verbs, and most of the common prepositions and pronouns. Then I unofficially got the hang of the word order. Then I started noticing verb conjugations. Then I started noticing that the articles and pronouns changed if they went with a subject, a direct object, or an indirect object. Then I noticed that they seemed to do it irregularly oh my god this does not make sense sometimes they even do different things with the same preposition and went to german.about.com to clear up this URGENT AND LIFE-CHANGING MYSTERY. And it all went downhill from there.
Suffice to say that when I walked into my first day of high school German class, I could no longer multitask while listening to Rammstein, and I could chatter fluently about fire, death, blood, crosses, churchyards, BDSM, and frozen undead children with music boxes in the place of hearts, but I had no idea how to say "Hello, my name is
10littlebullets."