Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“She reminded me of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked it, the petals all fell off.”
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
Random tips for learning German
1. Always learn the article / gender with the noun and don’t assume the gender only basing on the word’s form. It’s true that many words that end on -e have the article “die” and are female, but not all! - “der Affe”, masculin and “der” But also learn the general rules that exist for the articles, like: Every noun ending on “-heit” goes with the article “die”: die Krankheit, die Freiheit, … Every noun ending on “-ung” also goes with “die”: die Heizung, die Versammlung, …
2. Always put new words into sentences to see them in context. That’s actually my advise for every language. I never only study words, I always try to put them into easy sentences. In German you can train the form of the words like that, since they change a lot due to genders: “Ich habe einen Vogel”, aber: “Ich habe eine Katze”.
3. Learn Modal Verbs first: can, must, might, may. With those verbs you will be able to communicate a lot of things.
4. Learn with texts. Take a German text and underline the different kinds of words in different colors, for example nouns in red, verbs in blue and adjectives in green. Get familiar with the forms of those words until you recognize them and how they work in sentence structure.
5. Get familiar with sentence structure and word order. Look at sentences and translate / repeat them.
6. That’s kind of obvious, but watch German movies / shows and listen to German music, to get used to hear the language.
7. The most important thing for learning a language is repetition and repetition doesn’t have to take long or be complicated. Just grab a piece of paper and write every German word or sentence you can remember - maybe give yourself a timer, like 5 minutes are enough. Then go check what you did right and where you do have to repeat the rules etc. This is like I learned most languages and like I studied for university. I have heaps of paper on which I just randomly write things I remember. Then I correct the mistakes and do it again … It’s easy and it does help.
Henry Miller, from a letter to Anaïs Nin, featured in “A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953″
Margaret Atwood, True Stories; from ‘Small Poems for the Winter Solstice’
Part Three, Book I, Chapter 6, Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
“I was looking for a love unlike my parents’ love or my sister’s love or the love on a foreign kitchen floor. I wanted my own kitchen to keep clean and full of bread and milk and hot sauce and a big clean empty sink where I could wash my dishes. I wanted to forgive my mother and father for their misery and find myself a light man who lived buoyantly and to be both his light and his dark, serious baby.”
— Rebecca Dinerstein, The Sunlit Night
