"Ich würde es genauso wieder machen"

Ahhh, I've been meaning to write an actual (as in, non-travel) update for a while, but I just can't seem to force myself to do it. Every time I write a blog entry I get in the groove, but if I don't write another right away, I never feel like doing it again. So, since this is about me learning German, I guess I should write some stuff about German.

Well, I've been trying to read stuff in German more, since I've already pretty much mastered speaking with people (okay, not mastered, but I can do it without any trouble). I figure I might as well take advantage of having tons of German reading material at hand while I actually can. One thing I've discovered: I must read really easy books in English. I've read a few books in German by either authors I've read in English or comparable ones, and the books have all been fairly easy. Example: chick lit. I mean, I knew chick lit books weren't exactly heavy literature, but after reading a few in German, I think I need to beef up my reading list in English. The good thing about reading books like that in German is that I learn more everyday words and phrases, ones that maybe I've heard but never knew what they meant. One bad thing about reading in German: it's easy to read stuff with words I don't know and still get the gist of it. That sounds like a good thing, but it means that I'm not learning what those words mean. It's not always possible to figure out what a word means just from its context, and unless the meaning of the sentence is completely lost on me, I'm not going to bother to look up the word (that gets old fast). Anyway, I've made a rule for myself that, once I finish the two English books that I already got out of the library, I can only read German books from now until I get back to America.

So, one thing that sucks is I'm already forgetting how hard it is to learn another language. To remind myself:

Laura's Progression of Oral Comprehension:
1. Understanding conversations I am participating in
2. Understanding conversations I am not participating in, but where I know the people involved (example: at dinner)
3. Understanding conversations where I have no relationship to the speakers and am eavesdropping (example: random travelers on the train)

It's crazy the stuff I take for granted in English! I am learning so much stuff about language in general, and how much attention it really takes to process it. I think (I hope) this will help me next year. But I wonder if there is a level of comprehension after 3? It's tough for me to compare it to English comprehension, since I never hear English spoken. Until I went to Italy and came in contact with other groups of native English speakers, I wasn't sure if I easily understood conversations that I overheard (turns out that, yes, I do), so I realized that it was a big thing when I could understand overheard conversations in German.

New and exciting: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. OK, not exactly new...and maybe exciting isn't the right word either. The White Rose was a resistence group against Hitler in the 1940s. They published (anonymously, of course) six extremely critical pamphlets against the regime and mailed them randomly to people in Germany. The stakes were so high that they didn't even send them from Munich, where they lived (most of them were students at the University of Munich). They would have them delivered to other cities and then mailed from there. They only published six, because after the sixth one they were caught. Sophie and Hans Scholl, brother and sister from Ulm, and Christoph Probst were the first ones arrested; the others were caught within a few months. All of the members were arrested, tortured, "tried", and shortly thereafter (as in, a few hours after) executed by beheading. I know that if we lived in a society like theirs, I would never have the courage to do what they did. I only hope I can attempt to live my life even a little bit as well as they did. More info here. You can read the six pamphlets in English or in German.

I'm reading a book about Sophie Scholl now, a book in a series called "rebellious women". The subtitle of the book is "Ich würde es genauso wieder machen"; "I would do it exactly the same again."