Over-ambition

[fivemack]

I've decided to try reading a well-received thriller (Franz Schätzing's Der Schwarm) in German, to improve my German.

This may be a foolish exercise, since the list of words I've had to look up so far include

Verschwindet	disappears
Heerscharen	hosts (multitudes)
die Qualle	jellyfish
Unterdessen	meanwhile
gewaltig	immense (general adjective of amplification)
Zangenkiefern	not sure (fangs? Zangen are forceps, but Kiefern are pine-trees)
Hingezaubert	conjured forth
Ahnen	to suspect
der Vorfall	incident
die Bedrohung	threat
der Fortbestand	continuity
vermeintlich	alleged
die Werbeagentur	advertising agency
ausgebildeter	trained (selbstausgebildet = self-trained)
der Taucher	diver
erfüllen	to accomplish

and I have only just finished reading the blurb before page one. You probably get an idea of the theme of the book from this vocabulary alone, in much the same way as, trying to read the lead article in a German newspaper, I learned in succession 'Mut' (courage), 'Pflicht' (duty) and 'Mehrwertsteuer' (value-added tax).

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yikes; I actually remembered several words on that list (starting with the first, which made me feel all powerful; but the average went way down after that).

Back in the mid 1970s I read a couple of SF novels in german to try to keep mine up (I lived in Zurich the 1966-67 academic year, and then took 4 years of highschool german when I got back). And after that stopped trying, because, like, I live in the US and all that is far, far away.