Before I get into the post I must say what a lame month for blogging! I apologize for my lack of bloggy-ness. You klnow how your parents always say, "don't want to grow up so fast, time just keeps going by faster adn faster. Before you know it you are old!" I never really paid attention to it, how could years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds possible go any faster? They are a measured unit of time- they simply are what they are. Now that I am nearing 30, I have noticed that my perception of those units of time is what change. Albert Einstein has a great quote that relates,
"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."Anyway, what I am trying to say is that time does seem to go faster the older you get, even though it is only your perception of it. Maybe it slows down again at some point later on in life- I'll let you know if I get there. All I have left to say about this subject, for now, is that the week goes by and I don't even realize it it seems. I am still stuck somewhere back in November of 2009.
Which happens to bring me to my topic. In late October and ealry November last year, my husband and I had the amazing opportunity to visit his sister, our brother-in-law, and niece over in Germany. We had an absolutely fantastic time, it was such a blast. One of the things that was so cool and so very much appreciated was the fact that many Germans, especially those under 40, spoke English and spoke it fairly well. Here is the thing though, most weren't only bilingual, some spoke 3 or 4 languages. I realize that the borders of our country make it a little different as far as interaction with other languages on a daily basis, whereas over there, you could drive around for 2 weeks straight and hit some part of like 12 nations. For example in Belgium they spoke Flemish, French, German and English. It is a smaller nation surrounded by other nations. I think our lingual isolation could easily be overcome if we taught language better, and if it were more of priority. Did you ever notice how no one had to teach you English? That when you were a kid you just kind of picked it up. Sure you learned words and vocabulary but it was much easier then our High School method of teaching language. I think you should be exposed to more language early on, in preschool and kindergarten. My little niece- fluent in German, she went to a German preschool/daycare type thing and just picked it up. Something about our brains just pick up language easier when we are young, so I think we should teach language then. Not taking any language out of High School- then you could learn more complex language stucture instead of trying to memorize apple is ... dog is ... cat..., etc. We would already know all that basic vocabulary and could instead focus on higher level lingual learning (nice alliteration if I do say so myself:). Then by college how cool would it be to read all those books they make you study in their original language, ok so maybe not all because you probably wouldn't be that fluent in all languages, but even to read some would be such an experience. Not to knock translations but sometimes things just don't translate the same. For example- how cool would it be to read the Bible in some of the original language?! Way cool. We would understand the English word "love" could be one of 3 words in the original language (Greek is what I am talking about here), "philo" meaning brotherly-type love, "eros"- passionate type, desiring love, and "agape" - meaning sacrificial love. All describing rather different emotions and actions.
So to wrap it all up, I wish we taught language earlier in this country. And I wish I knew more languages. My Spanish is super rusty, I was pretty good at it- not fluent by any means, but I defintely could get around with it, when I was in college. I had a teacher that would only speak Spanish to us- total immersion, especially by the end of the class. In the beginning he would answer in english sometimes if we had questions, but by the end, we didn't need him to because we could understand.
The picture is us with my sister-in-law and niece and her German friends- who were awesome and invited us into their home for dinner one night. They made zweiblecochen- not sure if I spelled it right, it's a German dish that is translated literally as "onion cake" and is kind of like a flat quiche- oh and absolutely delicious!
Here is more Germany:
