The lazy way to learn German

When I was a junior in college I had two years of high school German and a few semesters of college-level German under my belt and was about to embark on a year-long study abroad program in Austria the following fall. And I couldn't *really* speak German.

At the same time I was taking a really interesting music theory class. One day in class we watched a biography on Igor Stravinsky. Since the class was about theory, I suppose I was supposed to remember something about his music and how he wrote it, but all I retained was the fact that he *always* carried a little notebook with him so he could write down new words he learned, musical ideas, etc., so he wouldn't forget them. And I was totally inspired. I was already stressing out more than a little bit about my upcoming trip to Austria and was (understandably) nervous about my sub-par German skills. But this handy dandy notebook scheme seemed like a fantastic idea for learning German fast! So fantastic that I wanted to start with it immediately.

So after class, I wandered down to the Bookie and proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes of my day browsing the notebook/journal/sketchbook aisle until I happened across the perfect notebook. It was small and had lined pages and a picture of a dragonfly on the periwinkle, handmade paper cover. And it cost something like $12.00. In 2001. Ouch.

For the first few days I was pretty diligent about using it. At the time I was also trying to re-learn my music theory in German for the placement exams I would have to take at the music conservatory in the fall, so I wrote in all the important vocabulary in my notebook. And I even tried to jot down words I learned in my German class so I would remember them faster.

Right. And inevitably the notebook fell to the bottom of my backpack and never really saw the light of day again until I found it in a random box in my parents' attic a couple summers ago and started using the copious amount of blank pages to write out my daily to-do lists. And they were long. Remember, I used to be a workaholic. Whew.

So now it is several years later and I have been living in Germany for about 18 months and I am still struggling to reach complete fluency, although I have to admit that I have relativly little trouble understand most of what's said to me and my brain has ceased to react in that deer-caught-in-the-headlights sort of way of freezing up on me when I meet a new person with a slightly different accent than I'm used to hearing. And I still don't write things down or study new vocabulary or look up words I don't know in the dictionary. Because I've discovered that my brain has worked out a very interesting filing system that seems to work for me and still increases my German vocabulary.

What happens is that when I read or hear an interesting-sounding word I don't know, that word gets filed away in the "German words I don't know" bin in my brain. And amazingly, that bin is not a vortex or black hole, because usually after a few days, weeks, or months, that same word I don't know will randomly come up in conversation or in a book or whatever, and suddenly because of the different context in which it's presented, I will suddenly understand what it means. And then I'll hear this *click* noise in my brain as the word is removed from the "German words I don't know" bin and is refiled with its English counterpart. Super!

The best example I have for this phenomenon is the word "smaragd." I first saw it when I was reading a trashy romance novel this winter and it was used to describe the heroine's eyes. So, I knew at that point that it must be a color of some sort. And the word itself looked really cool and kind of made me think of dragons. But since I was too lazy to look it up, I filed it away and kept reading. So about four weeks ago, we were in staging rehearsals for the Wizard of Oz and people kept mentioning the "Smaradgenstadt" a lot. And then I heard the *click* noise in my brain. I know the story to the Wizard of Oz! They're talking about the Emerald City! And the heroine of my trashy romance novel has emerald-colored eyes! Smaragd means emerald in German! (And how weird that the word originally made me think of dragons, which in my brain are usually green.)

Yes, I know I could have just looked up the word in a dictionary. But like this post title, it's the lazy way to learn German. And I kind of like the clicking sensation in my brain when stuff fits together like that.