Goethe: Turning in his grave ...ON TO GERMAN LATER.
I woke up this morning. Sorry ~ I couldn't sleep in the night, so I woke up in the afternoon ~ after being bothered by someone on the phone who would have wanted me to score drugs for them, which I didn't want to do at 9am. (Not that I would EVER score for anyone else ~ that is highly illegal.)... Anyway: after all this, I finally slept under a tent-like uncovered duvet for several hours, and woke up around 2pm feeling cold, tired, penniless... and craving heroin.
But I didn't take any. Now I feel less cold, and tired. But little less miserable. But hey ~ that's drugs for you.
And now an illustrated delight: I have scarring like this (full-thickness "burns" from barbiturates ~ from adulterated heroin ~ though more than twice as big) although my skin is not black ...
OK and
now the German bit. That headline, knowing my luck is probably spelled incorrectly, and I may even have got the wording totally wrong. But that would be ironic/poetic/thing/whatever because it is meant to read "MY TERRIBLE GERMAN!"
Yesterday I did an online test, very quickly, that is supposed to gauge your level of proficiency. Unfortunately it concentrated on GRAMMAR which is my weakest point. Without going into detail, German grammar is (to me) fiendishly difficult. For which reason I actually found the supposedly arcane Japanese language
far easier to grasp. Japanese is a so-called Synthetic or
Agglutinative language, which means instead of placing prepositions (which mean something alone: on in upon, etc) you tag on "particles" expressing the same ideas to the end of already-formed words. English does this in that you say one girl, two girl
s. -S denotes the plural, but means nothing on its own. Likewise, "I want; I wantED" ~ the -ED means nothing alone but we all know it denotes a past action. Well Japanese you might say "Tokyo-e" meaning "to Tokyo" But! The -e, just like English -s or -ed, means nothing alone. That is the difference between a mostly "
analytical" language (like English) and an agglutinative one, like Japanese. German is neither of these, it is "
inflexional" and these tongues ~ in my opinion ~ are the most fiendishly difficult of all.
You can read a very good account of the absurdities of German grammar by Edgar Allen Poe, who explains them far better than I ever could, by clicking
here.
But might I add, upon rereading his rant, I would guess Mr Poe had not studied any other foreign language if he is that confounded by certain other aspects of German... e.g. saying something "rests" somewhere, rather than "is" somewhere ... because that's what foreign languages are ~ FOREIGN!
Anyway, back to this test. Which unfortunately focused on grammar, my weakest point. I have been concentrating on building a passive reading vocabulary. But unfortunately the university prospectuses I read ~ and this test ~ were full of terms I just didn't know. Meaning I didn't really understand a great many of the phrases as I raced through. And I didn't spent much longer than 2 seconds on each question.
I got a B1, which is shockingly poor, considering how much time I slogged away at that fiendish Teutonic tongue in my youth ... even WITH a 19-year gap in between!
The grades go A1 (lowest) A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 (highest) so you see I got 3 out of 6. DREADFUL!!
I would say my level (dreadful grammar aside) is somewhere between B2 and C1. To give an example: I very often grasp close to or exactly what a writer is saying ~ yet would flounder for ages to express such ideas in English. Because the German writer has played to the strengths of his or her own language.
But I couldn't express myself in writing in anything better than a heavily-accented pidgin-language, of the sort one might expect of an uneducated 3rd world peasant. Truly shocking. Although people from Iran, Pakistan etc ~ as well as from "3rd world" countries frequently attend universities (somehow) in the UK. And likewise I shall go to Deutschland ~ hahar!
You can find the Goethe Institut's German test
here.
And the meanings of the marks
here.
ミクロネシア連邦
NOT WHEN I WANT TO (ie not until past 6am). 
FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY'S PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE! He emailed me back! I can't believe it. I'm flattered that someone so high up such a posh ivory tower would write to a drug addict like me. (Of course my email mentioned nothing about my personal circumstances, but you get where I'm coming from.) He gave three book titles I was able to key into Amazon, and comparing reviews and other recommendations finally get somewhere.
SURELY ~ after I said I loved this time of year ~ I cannot have the autumnal blues?
On to "new beginnings" ~ anyone remember my JAPANESE OBSESSION? This is nothing new ~ I have had a fascination with most things Japanese (not so much the food) since my teens. 
The one guidebook I used to have: Teach Yourself Japanese Script gave Chinese-originated kanji characters, along with their meanings ~ bamboo, river, mountain etc ~ IN ENGLISH! If you wanted to learn the Japanese words for these things you had to look them up at the back. After a few pages of this I was ready to scream and bang my head on the table. The fact that I still remember what bamboo, river and mountain look like yet haven't a clue how to pronounce them surely says it all.
To remedy the situation I sent of an email this morning to the British-born Professor of Japanese at Oxford. Surely if anyone can recommend a good book, he can ...
The day finished off with my moody housemate ~ the one I was yelling at a couple of months ago after he claimed to my face that I hadn't said hello to him when I just did two seconds before... that person, who's forever convinced he's right, required my help assembling a double bed which screwed together ~ with non-screwing wooden supporting nubs in between. This man was trying to hold together two bed-ends and a frame with just the wooden nubs. He was planning to put the screws in afterwards. Surely I don't need to tell you how successful this approach was.
THIS IS A PICTURE of the Australian drug-memoirist Kate Holden, who published her story of middle-class girl's fall from sheltered upbringing to heroin addict a few years ago to international success. After taking heroin for some months she hit the point all addicts hit, when friends will no longer lend money, credit cards are spent ... etc and something else has to be done to raise money. So she went out and sold her body on the streets. One night a man picked her up saying he worked for a brothel that needed new girls. Two brothels later she had become one of Melbourne's most prized "ladies" of the night. 
SEASON OF MISTS... and all that. Lots of folks I know deplore this time of year because it reminds them of death and dying. But I love it. I associate it with new beginnings. Especially when there's the smoky tang of bonfires in the air ...
I APPEAR to have found a university course where you can study German as a foreign language in Germany ~ at the University of Heidelberg (in cuckoo-clock-land!) ~ which, founded in 1386, is the oldest university in Germany.
I DIDN'T GO INTO TOWN and buy the German news magazines this morning... that's because I blew all the money on drugs instead..! No! I'm kidding ~ I rang University College London (the most central London college (of high repute) ~ it's in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. Bloomsbury is the nearest London has to the Left Bank in Paris... stately, (relatively) quiet. And a profusion of mature trees dropping conkers on yer 'ead up just about every road)... I rang UCL and asked the Students' Union whether they had a bookshop where I might pick up secondhand coursebooks. The nice lady said, "No dear. But there is a Waterstones on Mullet Street. Most people go there."
(THOUGH I'M NOT ENTIRELY SURE the one with the leopard isn't a RAT..!)
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The one that got me the most was Cambridge (why apply anywhere crap?). Two stipulations I have about a course in German are that 1: the department should also teach Dutch. Because if you speak French, German and Dutch you an almighty swathe of Europe becomes "yours". Dutch is very similar to German so learning it is a process of conversion rather than discovery anew... The last place I studied didn't even offer Dutch (though they specialized in Scandinavian languages ~ more people speak Dutch than ALL Scandinavian languages together!) And Oxford, by the way doesn't do Dutch. And point 2: they MUST give details of modules or "papers" and reading lists in advance. Which Cambridge do, and perusing down them only increased this sad longing. And Cambridge is such a beautiful town (much nicer than Oxford). In the end I just wanted to cry.
I WAS UNFORTUNATE ENOUGH to take the bus today. A bus that got snarled up in traffic for what felt like half an hour but must have been about ten minutes at ONE set of traffic lights. Itchiness of feet and Egyptian-tomb-like claustrophobia were eating into me so bad I felt I couldn't take another moment on this thrumming sardine-tin torture machine. So I very nicely asked the driver if he would let me out. But the old moustached petrol tanker exploded on me "What? Let you out here? In the traffic? With quite possibly an undercover instructor on board??" 
If I'd had TIME to deal with constables I'd have gladly argued my case (it's not a "breach of the peace" to open a door, is it! And what crime can it possibly be? If I'm desperate enough to open a door in full (motionless) traffic, surely it's my lookout if I'm going to get run-down.) But anyway we were at a stop and the bus driver continued haranguing me. And saying "You're lucky I'm in a good mood"~!! So I told him to f*** off. And regretted it. I actually wished I'd told him I wished he would crash. That would probably get to a bus driver more. Then I thought about it and wished I'd kept my face blank, my mouth shut and merely risen above it all with quiet dignity... but hindsight is an awfully great teacher ...
