Apologies

First, I want to apologise for my long silence. First, there were exams and I guess it is much better to actually learn than write about learning :) I have passed them all, much better than I expected, and I do not have any retakes in September. In October I begin the second year of German Philology :) So you may think splendid holidays were before me, but, oh, no. The illness that I had had since last September with little breaks here and there finally caught me strongly in its grip, and the entire July I was really sick, I coughed all the time and had even difficulty breathing. Then I finally went to the right doctor who knew how to help me, and I began August as a healthy person. But I did not write anything on this blog, because I came with the idea of another blog, about books and reading. I am really fond of book blogs. I have read on some of them that if you write good book reviews, you may get books for free from the publishing houses in return for a review. So I started this blog to teach myself to write in Polish again - the reviews must be in Polish, because you can get the books only from Polish publishing houses. I post everyday on this blog, but to be honest there are only a couple of actual reviews there. Most likely I write about literature in general and technology which helps us read and discover new books, such as e-books and audiobooks. I have one reader already, apart from my Mum, this is a friend from Tolkien forum.

My Mum suggested that I should write the blog in English again, and it is definitely a good idea. Today, when I was researching for today's entry about literary inspiration in music. I was writing about Blind Guardian's music and did a search on their "A Song of Ice and Fire" songs on Youtube. I found a song called "A Voice in the Dark" - the video to it was interesting, because it was just a black space with lyrics to the song in both English and German. Then I remembered my German learning method, which is very enjoyable. You need Youtube to do this. It is also necessary to know the names of singers or bands with music in the language you want to learn. For German, I usually choose Nena, Rammstein,Die Arzte, Die Toten Hosen etc. Go to the search engine on Youtube and enter the name of the musician or band together with the word "lyrics." In this way you are more likely to find videos with the lyrics embedded. Then listen to a song, reading the lyrics at the same time. This is a fun way to learn - you can study the spelling and pronunciation simultaneously, and note down the new words easily. Give it a try!

Why German?

This year my greatest dream of graduating from English philology finally came true, as I passed my MA defence exam. At the same time, I've begun the German philology in my home city. I first came across German in grammar school, and then I attended foreign language course while studying English philology.This course lasted only three terms. We used the same textbook I have had in grammar school and made very little progress compared to what I had learnt in grammar school. The teacher was not very demanding, she didn't want to burden us with too much material as we had almost all other classes in English. (It was English philology after all!)After three terms there was an exam, I passed and got an A, but it wasn't very advanced German all the same. Suffice it to say that after this course I was aware of two German grammar tenses, namely Prasens and Perfekt. But after the exam I had abandoned German totally, and for five years I haven't read anything in German. The only contact I had with German was moving my old textbooks from one shelf to another ;)

Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to study German philology after all. With so little prior knowledge of German, I struggle with this language, and the teachers have a nerve-wracking tendency to speak more and more in German ;)I worry all the time that the first immediate result of this struggle will be forgetting my beloved English as I have almost no time to read in English as I used to do, I have to work so hard on my German. To prevent this, and to follow the example of many language bloggers, I've decided to document my struggle with German on this blog. I hope I will stick to my decision and the blog will have more than just one entry ;)