Okay so this fucking duolingo bird has been sending me passive aggressive messages for a long ass time. I’m well aware that I’m making Duo sad, at this point. No, I can’t take ten minutes to practice, actually. Sorry.

I have fucking pavloved myself into feeling profound guilt whenever I see that particular shade of green and I don’t like it. 😅😂

I feel like I got frustrated with the German sequence when we started talking about the dative case. At that point, we were up to roughly twelve entirely context dependant variations on the word “the.” There are more of them.

Even as a native English speaker with no concept of any of the grammer things, I feel like I could totally have picked up on the idea of indirect objects, if you’d given me a lot of time in a room alone.

What really got me was the completely arbitrary gendering of nouns. Why the fuck are statues feminine while ducks are masculine while beer is neuter while there is no singular word for grandparent? I can’t.

German 101 is about to be over and done with. There’s an exam on Thursday.

We’ve been spending time with modal verbs. There are also these other verbs with separating prefixes – these fuckers sometimes just split in half and conjugate as they migrate to opposite ends of the sentence, for some reason. Other times, they don’t.

Also, there are pronouns and prepositions for the accusative and dative cases. I don’t mind those, even though I’m still thinking about them as neatly and conveniently lined up in a chart. I wish I could just – call them to mind whenever I needed them, pluck them of the air, instead of thinking of columns and rows.

It would also be nice if I didn’t have to jump back and forth between German words and English words in order to understand their meaning. Why can’t the German words contain meaning in their own right, without having to refer back to English? I can’t decide if this has more to do with where I am in the process of learning, or if I’m doing this wrong.

Anyway. It’s important that I keep working through this, until I can hold my own in a conversation, because Kathrin is going to have a baby and I need to be able to communicate with this tiny human in words. Eventually.

When this child is three and I’m approximately twenty four, I’d like for our skill in the language to be roughly comparable, for entirely ego related reasons.

The first time these two fly across the pond to visit the states, I want to be able to talk about how the journey was in a language that’s familiar. Just because. If Kathrin needed me to fly across the pond and live in Münster for a time, if she needed that help, then I’d do it.

But it would be nice if I could understand the conversations going on around me.

I have no real obligation to Kathrin’s baby whatsoever, objectively, perhaps. But if this is the motivation that I need in order to pass this final with flying colors – then there we are.

Ich bin eine Tante.