the benefits of research in a second language

 It has been a long time since I put anything new here. I'll just write a quick post to keep the blog alive. 

At the beginning of the long lockdowns here in Victoria, Australia, I, like many others, was looking for some intellectual stimulation to help me deal with the stress.

It occurred to me to take up my study of German again, after many decades of not reading or speaking the language. 

I was very lucky to come across a great class run by the CAE here in Melbourne - German language online.

At first, to me it was a matter of learning the language, then after a while it became learning in that language, and finally I've arrived at the stage where it's learning about things in the new language.

This ability to discover information in German has opened up many new doors for me. For instance, recently my dog Peppa had a grass seed in her foot. (Major bother and major expense.) When I went to the vet today for what I hope is the final check-up on her recovery, he told me how grass seeds drill into the flesh of dogs, and are formed in such a way that they resist being pulled out.

I felt quite pleased to say that I'd read about this recently on a German website. I'd visited lots of blogs and webpages about the problem, as any concerned dog owner would, but that specific piece about the structure of grass had been in German. 

I'd taken notice of it because I was looking for the translation of the word Grannen on the German site: the word means awn in English. Wikipedia has a rather scary explanation of how the awns of wild emmer wheat bury themselves in the soil. I'd better not go down that rabbit hole, or I'll never take my dog to a grassy area again. Here's hoping the grasses around here are less active. 

Knowing German is great fun, because there's so much of the internet to explore.