Learning a Foreign Language Through Poetry

Guest post by Laraine Flemming
Laraine's text is longer than my usual posts and therefore opens in a new window.

I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment of the value of memorizing poems, not only to assist in learning a foreign language, but also to make you appreciate the finer points of your own language. I believe I have an ear for the rhythm and melody that can be achieved in a text, and I think one reason is that we had to memorize poems in school and recite them aloud. That way, I started to see the expressive potential of different meters and to the present day, I 'hear' the sentences that I write down. I attribute this directly to my experience with reciting poems.

To me, the claim that one doesn't learn anything from memorizing poems is dubious, to say the least. It's just one of the many ways in which education has been dumbed down over the last decades based on spurious claims that do not hold up to scrutiny.

Word of the Month: Unglücksrabe

Word of the Month: Index

A Pechvogel was the first 'compound creature' I drew and posted on my blog. I'm finally getting around to giving him a companion in misery. Unglück is the opposite of Glück (good fortune, luck), and we encountered a Rabe (raven) already in connection with Rabeneltern. Like a Pechvogel, an Unglücksrabe is a person who has run into some misfortune—he and a Pechvogel are partners in bad luck.



The most famous Unglücksrabe in German literature is Hans Huckebein, the anti-hero of a story told in pictures by Wilhelm Busch. I have to do some more research to find out why ravens are associated with bad luck in this expression.

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]

Word of the Month: Buchschmuck

Word of the Month: Index

We know by now that a Buch is a book. Schmuck means "jewelry", both the precious stuff you possess and the stuff you use to accessorize your person. The Schmuck in Buchschmuck is of the second kind: It's the sum of the graphical elements that have been added to a book's pages to enhance the status of the book as an artifact—the decoration of the title page; the special treatment of the first letters of a chapter etc. These features are not to be confused with illustrations intended to support the text—they have a practical purpose, Buchschmuck has not, in the narrow sense. It does not contribute to our understanding of the text, but it may contribute significantly to our enjoyment of the book as an object—it makes it more precious. I show, as an example, on the left the title pages of the edition of the Grimms' fairy tales that motivated me, in second grade, to teach myself the old-fashioned font called Fraktur in German.



I must confess that I have not seen the term Buchschmuck used in a long time. It sounds old-fashioned, harking back to a time when books were objects that could be considered precious. Are these days gone? Or, to put it differently, could eBooks have Buchschmuck? More generally, could they become carefully-crafted objects to be appreciated as such? I see no reason, in principle, why they couldn't.

Wagner Heralds the Arrival of May

If April is the cruellest month, May is the loveliest, at least for those who—like my wife and I—were born in it. This is how Siegmund rapturously celebrates its onset (and his re-unification with his twin sister, Sieglinde) in the first act of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle:

Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond.
In mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz...

Winter storms gave way to the Month of Joy.
Spring glows in a soft light...

The link I'm giving above is to a concert version—I didn't like the staged versions I found on YouTube because I did not like the staging (or the tenor's knödeln—seeming to press and sing through his nose). Instead, I show below part of the panel depicting the scene in P. Craig Russell's graphic retelling of the opera.


[Source: P. Craig Russell, The Ring of the Nibelung, Volume One, 2002. © P. Craig Russell. Used by permission]

Word of the Month: Die Kampfsau, das Kampfschwein

Word of the Month: Index

Just in time for the beginning of the most exciting phase of the soccer year in Europe—The final stages of the Champions League and European League competitions:

Kampf means "fight," a Sau is a sow and a Schwein a pig. Kampfsau and Kampfschwein are terms used in sports, particularly soccer, where they are applied to players who may be technically limited, but more than make up for it by their unflagging fighting spirit, by the abandon with which they risk, not life, but certainly limbs, fighting for the ball and tackling players on the opposing team. And if their jersey is not the dirtiest at the end of the match, they know they haven’t given it their best effort.

Calling someone a Sau or a Schwein in German is an insult, and a relatively bad one. But in combination with Kampf, these words turn into compliments: Kampfsäue and Kampfschweine (those are the the plurals) tend to be fan favorites.



I wonder how speakers of languages that avoid consonant clusters will deal with Kampfschwein, which requires one to enunciate 5 consonants in a row: m • p • f • sch (same as English "sh") • w.

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]

Word of the Month: Torschlusspanik

Word of the Month: Index

I was reminded of this word when Kathleen Kiesel Cozzarelli sent me an e-mail inquiry about it, and it is a very useful word indeed. Tor means "gate" (or, in soccer, "goal"); Schluss can mean many things—in the present Word of the Month, it stands for "closing"; and Panik is the same as English "panic". In combination, they refer to the intense anxiety one feels when a decision has to be made before an approaching deadline, but none of the available options looks in any way promising. The term is also used to explain why a hasty decision was made under these circumstances.

Back in the days when women were supposed to get married, Torschlusspanik was regularly used to explain why a woman who was fast approaching middle age would marry someone below her status. Times have changed, and for the better in this case. For decades, I haven't heard the term applied to women marrying later in life. But it's used regularly in other situations, for example, when just before the end of the annual trading period for players, a soccer team that needs to improve at certain positions acquires players who may not be particularly skilled at these positions, or are past their prime, but were the only ones still available.

Three Literary Parodies and an Homage

I've finally found the time to collect, in one place, the literary "finger exercises" occasioned by the MOOC (massive open online course) "Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World" I took in the summer of 2012. The course was taught by Prof. Rabkin of the University of Michigan. COURSERA provided the supporting software and infrastructure.

Three Parodies and an Homage

People who do not have first-hand experience with a COURSERA-based course may not get the insider jokes in the Alice piece. But the rest does not rely on such knowledge—you just have to know the literary piece being skewered/paid homage to.