A Race, and a German Conversation

Today I ran a 5K race in Astoria Park. I’d never been there before. I was not very fast, but my foot is definitely getting better.

Astoria Park in Queens

A Beautiful Day for a Race

Yesterday, as usual, I went to the Goethe-Institut in SoHo for my Friday afternoon conversation. My arrangement with them, which I think benefits me far more than them, is that I do a little German-to-English translation in exchange for a weekly two-hour conversation session.

So, before I went down there, I finished translating a bulleted list of job responsibilities for the position of director of their student-exchange program. My conclusion: bulleted lists, particularly with work-related verbiage and incomplete sentences, are much harder to translate than non-workplace prose consisting of complete sentences grouped into standard paragraphs.

Heike, Who Won’t Tell Me the Gender of Nouns

I did not leave enough time for train delays, and I reached the Goethe-Institut eight minutes late. I felt terrible for being tardy. “Das ist nicht sehr deutsch,” said one of the young women there, teasing me. (That’s not very German.) I could not argue with that.

Today’s conversation was attended by three women from the office. All have a great sense of humor. One of them, Heike, studied linguistics in school and is amusingly stern with me when I ask questions.

If I inquire, for example, what the gender of a particular noun is so I can pick the right article, she merely looks at me and says, “Was denkst du?” (What do you think?)

There is simply no extracting the answer from her. She is tough!