Laurabelle’s Blog

In my last post, I posited that I'm worthless at translation between my three languages, French, German, and English. Here's a funny story apropos of that. Just before Christmas 1999, I flew home from Mount Holyoke to visit my family. When I arrived at the airport three hours before my flight (not my choice! it [...]

German is famous for stringing words together to make another one. This makes three-mile-long words that are sometimes unintelligible, but on the other hand it's almost always easy to figure out what long words mean from the little words inside them. It's also to compact lots of meaning into one word. For example, Unzurückhaltbarkeit. I found [...]

It's amazing, the stuff that accumulates at the back of one's closet. One of the things I found today is a Czech sentence with no vowels whatsoever: Strč prst skrz krk. It means Stick your finger through your throat. Not down your throat, through it. So how did I learn this vitally important bit of information? I was [...]

Dorothea wrote an interesting article about methods of foreign-language instruction which has brought my thoughts back in that direction, after a couple of years of abandonment. As my friends know, I speak, read, and write French, German, and English, not just conversationally but academically as well. Though I am somewhat out of practice, I was [...]

The other day I checked out some books from Suzzallo Library, one of which happened to be in German. I started reading it on the bus ride home and instantly got a wave of sort-of-homesickness just from reading the words and constructions that only German has. A language consists of more than just vocabulary and [...]

I almost thought that this article was real (this and the previously-posted link courtesy of Jessamyn): Bookslut - Library Rakehell - Policy Manual 2004: Make sure that patrons checking out suspicious material (this material is flagged in the database with a red check) have their address and contact information, as well as the titles in [...]