It is spring break time and young American college students are out and about in the world. Specifically, in Vienna as in more than I am used to. It has just been interesting since two friends from NYC randomly appeared in Vienna on Friday and then one of the other Fulbrighters has a whole groups of friends from Barnard/Columbia visiting. It is weird suddenly having loads of people around who are from my university/high school/home town. It is also amusing to notice how I have sort of assimilated. Granted I still talk like a German when I speak German and by no means an Austrian, but the guys dressed up like Mozart selling concert tickets don't give me a second look, where all the visiting American get pounced on as if they were holding bird feed and were surrounded by pigeons. Also one visiting friend said I had a German way of speaking in English (i.e. not quite right English). The language bit is weird because granted I do with a lot with languages these days, but I also do a lot English, but I really do have trouble remembering a lot of English words. This has been painfully obvious as I have been writing my research paper and I am searching for a word and I play the game of sounds like, nooo, similar though. I think I knew the word once. It is kind of link not having a mother tongue and struggling in every language. So this is a bit of a down beat entry, but as I plot the course for the coming year and consider going to yet another, albeit fascinating country, I just sort of wonder what it will bring.Monday, March 19, 2007
American Invasion
It is spring break time and young American college students are out and about in the world. Specifically, in Vienna as in more than I am used to. It has just been interesting since two friends from NYC randomly appeared in Vienna on Friday and then one of the other Fulbrighters has a whole groups of friends from Barnard/Columbia visiting. It is weird suddenly having loads of people around who are from my university/high school/home town. It is also amusing to notice how I have sort of assimilated. Granted I still talk like a German when I speak German and by no means an Austrian, but the guys dressed up like Mozart selling concert tickets don't give me a second look, where all the visiting American get pounced on as if they were holding bird feed and were surrounded by pigeons. Also one visiting friend said I had a German way of speaking in English (i.e. not quite right English). The language bit is weird because granted I do with a lot with languages these days, but I also do a lot English, but I really do have trouble remembering a lot of English words. This has been painfully obvious as I have been writing my research paper and I am searching for a word and I play the game of sounds like, nooo, similar though. I think I knew the word once. It is kind of link not having a mother tongue and struggling in every language. So this is a bit of a down beat entry, but as I plot the course for the coming year and consider going to yet another, albeit fascinating country, I just sort of wonder what it will bring.
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2 comments:
I feel like you should know about LEO, and if you don't, then you have committed a most grievous sin. Specifically I'm talking about http://dict.leo.org, which is a truly wonderful website. It's definitely the best for German-English, and I must say that it also helped me in my French class, because I knew the German word for what I was looking for in French! HA!
Oh I know LEO, though when you wrote that I thought you were taking about the person. I like dict.cc more, but leo is excellent I use it for French a lot too since German words are more compact and hence easier to look up and translate than English (usually a longer string of words. More than anything else I find myself wanting words that don't exist in English like a word meaning relationship, but without the the personal primary meaning (in German Verhältnis).
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