Apologies for the Tuesday instead of Weekend post again. Weekends here are not really a thing, to be honest. As the workload and variety of activities is increasing in amount and difficulty, my weekend spare time is getting shorter. Fortunately though, I can steal an evening here and there to take a break and write an update.
As for last week, it was busy and fulfilling as usual. Less overwhelming, too. Things started to fall into place and I finally started getting control over my German word order (I think). Complex tenses and particularly complex sentences still remain a difficulty in spoken German, but there is a progress. The weekend before last, I had written a love poem, and I gave it a final edit last Friday. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a writer in English or Macedonian, but that is sometime. And then there is German. For my level of German the idea of writing an actual poem seemed a bit far-fetched and impossible, but one way or another I finished and edited it. Thinking about it throughout the week, in contrast to all of the beautifully crafted love poems we read in my Literature class, I became all the more aware and, perhaps, humble about how much I still don’t know about the German language. There is so much vocabulary, so many rules (and exceptions to make it more interesting), idioms and expressions tightly intertwined with the cultural heritage of which one needs to be aware of in order to be able to develop a style in the language… Okay, I am getting unnecessarily philosophical here. What I am trying to say is there is always more to learn and baby steps are okay; and love poems with unbearable clichés and limited vocabulary are okay, too. In fact, I did not do too badly on my first poem in German.
A really cool thing that happened over this weekend was the concert organized by the Program for Singers that exists under the German Language School. In this program, there are a handful of students who besides being eager to learn the language, are exceptionally talented singers. They put up a wonderful show on Sunday night with amazing classical short pieces in German and looked quite surreal even from the front rows. You can see bellow a couple of pictures I stealthily tried to take.
Speaking of music, I am quite the addict. A background music (to my life) is playing more often than not to the point that I sometimes struggle with complete silence. Abiding by the Language Pledge, I have not listened to a single song in English or Macedonian over the past 3 weeks. Instead, I have googled and “youtubed” during every study session so far and have discovered some amazing German songs. So, I have decided to put a fine finish to this and the following posts with my discoveries. To warn you beforehand, my taste in German music, as much as many other components of my “German identity” is still developing, so expect to hear intense Pop and Indie Alternative and everything in between (expect for Metal, sorry).
Now, I will let you enjoy this extraordinary song by Andreas Bourani – Auf Uns.
Have a great week!
Tschüss,
Andrej Blazhevski
