in week 2 of the deutsch course, we have begun to learn “der, die, das”. not that there is anything to learn – it’s generally completely arbitrary whether a thing has a masculine, feminine or neuter article. no rule, just memorise. der champagne, die schere, das bügeleisen … we were given coloured post-it notes with nouns written on them & asked to stick them into the appropriate der, die, das columns – it took me a while to click that the pink ones were all die, the blue der & green das. i proposed a “das für alles!” campaign – after all if they can legislate to make spelling easier, why not make other things about the language easier too? what purpose is there to der, die das? english gets along fine with the, & slavic languages like serbian don’t even bother with article.

meanwhile, we have had 2 days of schnee; der schnee gefalt mir – alle es weiss heraus, und sehr schön. inside, i work – ich lerne deutsch, i’m writing reports & applications, & starting work on a redevelopment of the magdalena project web site. alles gute.