I want a Nilpferd or a Flußpferd for Christmas

Masculine, Feminine, or Neutral?   This is the question that I am starting to ask myself these days.   I took a couple of years of German in high school for two basic reasons:

1. I thought that it would be helpful if I went to Engineering school. (I went to Georgia Tech for a year, but never got far enough along to make the German pay off)
2. Because everyone else was taking Spanish and I wanted to be different.

Little did I know that I would again take German in college as part of my language requirements for music, and that I would end up singing a ton (like 60% of my repertoire) of German music.  Somehow God seems to point us in the right direction. I could only imagine taking Spanish in high school, and not German, and trying to now sing the amount of Bach, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. that I do.  I would struggle with it, I think, the way I have to work hard at singing French repertoire.


All of this being said, I did kind of skate by with my German classes in both high school and college.  I have never been great at language per se.  I have enough problems with English grammar and spelling. It is no shock that my SAT math scores were 150 points higher than my English scores.  Like many young men, I was drawn to science and math, and so I read less, and I wrote even less than that.  So, when it comes to German grammar, (which has its own very different structure)  I need a very heavy dose of "crash course."

On an artist's budget (or non-budget)  I cannot really afford Rosetta Stone to help me beef up my language skills.  On my trip to northern Italy this past summer, I had some private German lessons. (mostly because I was further advanced than most of my colleagues, who speak Italian, but not German)   I can honestly say that I didn't learn much actual language, but I did learn what I needed to learn before I moved to Germany. I need to focus my learning (or relearning) of German to two key areas:

1. Vocabulary, vocabulary, and more vocabulary.   It does me no good to only really know 5 verbs and only basic German when you are trying to build relationships with conductors, agents, and other colleagues.
2. Grammar, grammar, and grammar.   The expanded vocabulary does me no good if I use it like a three year-old, just pointing at things and saying what they are. For example,  I see a lemon; I point at it and say "die Zitrone."

Since Rosetta Stone is a bit out of my price range.  Ok it is $500 out my price range.  I found a suitable replacement in 9 discs worth of Instant Immersion German, in 3 levels for my computer.   This coupled with my dictionary, my box of 1001 flash cards, my German verb workbook, and a couple of other tools will be my guide in the near future to get myself back to a basic level of fluency.  From there, I was advised by a German colleague in Munich, that I should then grab a newspaper and start translating it.  I have also stumbled across the BBC websites' free on-line language learning center.   Now this site is really cool.



So, what cool words did I learn yesterday?    I learned:

• der Frosch = the frog
• die Ente = the duck
• das Nilpferd, das Flußpferd = the hippo

I am not quite sure where I will use them.   I am not quite sure why the German language says that a frog is masculine, a duck is feminine, and a hippo is neutral.  Perhaps it is because frogs turn into princes, ducks are cute and cuddly, and well, I am still confused about the Nile-horse/River-horse.   All I know is that I have three new words in my new vocabulary!  Now, off to learn 3 more!