Another quick word-nerd post

Still no time for a longer update, but this is a fun thing about German I'd like to share.

In English there is an important grammatical distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. You can have two fish, but you can't have two informations or two flours*. In German, both of these latter two are countable, and in Japanese I think all nouns are grammatically countable, so speakers of those languages often make the mistake of saying "thank you for the informations."

What I find fascinating is that whereas in English, there are words that can never be plural (you say "pieces of information"), in German there are words that can never be singular (there are also uncountables in German, like Wasser, "water"). The word for "parents" in German is Eltern, and it is always plural. If you want to say "one parent" you have to say Elternteil, which literally means "parents-piece." It's not that the singular of Eltern doesn't get used, it simply doesn't exist in the language.

What's been getting me all day today is the German word Software, which was stolen from English. In German you can say "a software," "eine Software". You would think that you would then be able to refer to "two softwares" or "many softwares", but you can't. If you have one Software it's countable, but as soon as you have more than one it becomes uncountable, and you have to say something like zwei Softwareprodukte (two software-products) or some such. So in the singular, Software is a countable noun, but when discussing unquantified numbers it's an uncountable noun.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with the marvel of logic and consistency that is the German language.

*Okay, for the smart-ass linguists out there about to correct me, you could say something like "choosing between flours when baking bread is a difficult task." But that's different.

Word of the day

I've been really, really wanting to post here the last few days, but I just don't have any time right now.

So, to tell it quickly; I have a job, and it's perfect for me. I'm having a blast.

And my new favorite word today is a true German monster: Sicherheitssoftwaremarktanteilanalyse. Meaning "a market share analysis of security software." Germany, as it turns out, was taking a bathroom break when the rest of the countries came up with the idea of spaces.

It is done

As of four thirty this afternoon, the second draft of my master's thesis is complete.

Weiber fast nackt

In Germany it is not Fat Tuesday that is celebrated, but Fat Thursday. Some places it's even called that: fetter Donnerstag. It is more commonly known as Weiberfastnacht. This night is one of Germany's Carneval celebrations, traditionally one of the Germans' last chances to go wild before the long, hard slog of Lent. Of course, Germany being a pretty secular place these days, most people recognize Lent by giving up alcohol until they recover from their Carnival hangovers.

I live in Düsseldorf, the German home of Carnival*, so at 11:11 this morning, the women of the city went raving, batshit crazy. Traditionally, on Weiberfastnacht the world is turned on its head and the women take control, notwithstanding the fact that Germany is actually being run by a woman at the moment. They storm town halls and make the mayors wear funny costumes. They carry scissors and sever the ties of any men they can find - men foolish enough to leave their ties at home find their shoelaces severed. It's all terribly fun, and this year I have decided to celebrate by eating a plate of salmon sashimi and avocado and drinking a glass of vodka and soda. My neckties are safely ensconced in the closet, and when I went to the fish shop I ran.

I'm trying to come up with a conclusion here, but I didn't really have a point. I just couldn't really let Weiberfastnacht go without mentioning it here - it's like Oktoberfest, one of those unique Germanisms that I find terribly endearing about the country but also do my best to avoid actually participating in.

*I'm saying this as a loyal resident of Düsseldorf. Cologne, I have been told, also throws a few quaint little Carnival celebrations that attract a few tourists each year.

Employment

As I believe I have mentioned on this blog before, a bit of a snafu occurred with my employment situation while I was away in Chiba, vastly improving my market value by studying why some Japanese people don't like some other Japanese people. I had left behind a lovely job as a software developer, with the agreement that I would resume my duties full time upon my return. Actually, I was already working full time in the sense of "40 hours a week," but according to the plan I was going to start working full time in the sense of "earning a normal salary." And then, as near as I can tell, some dudes named Lehman sold everyone a house, bankrupting Merryl Lynch. The government responded by taking over Washington Mutual, which led to the revelation that Bernie Madoff, responsible for an investement fund the size of a small nation's GDP, had instead blown the money on cocaine and party hats. The resulting crashes in cocaine and party-hat futures was a terrible double blow to my employer, who decided to fire someone to save some money. I, having no actual employment contract, was a terribly convenient target.

Unfortunately, the economic slump seems to have spilled out of the narcotics and pointy hat industries. In the best of times, finding work as a Japanese speaking computer programmer isn't the easiest thing. I mean, the jobs exist, it's not like we gather in the parking lot at Home Depot hoping to get picked up for a day of work translating technical manuals. Not that we would; Japanese technical manuals are translated by monkeys equipped with buckets of magnetic poetry.

Anyway. Not having the easiest time finding employment. I've sent my CV to tons of positions on Monster and StepStone (who are themselves hiring, interestingly enough), but my biggest hope has been with recruiters. Japanese companies in Germany are frequently looking for very specific skill sets. For example, sales people with experience in textiles and fluent Japanese, business analysts who know the German car market and speak fluent Japanese, window washers with a background in the theoretical applications of Windex and a solid command of Japanese. Since these people tend to be hard to find (almost all the grad students are doing practical Windex app. these days), they seem to rely almost exclusively on recruiters who specialize in Japanese companies operating in Europe.

One of these recruiters called me this morning, and it sounds like a job I was really, really hoping to get is going to come through some time this week. So there is hope that I shall be employed before the month is out. Go me!

Peter Fox: Schwarz zu Blau

I'm not usually a big fan of hip hop, but every once in a while I find an artist that really grabs me. Peter Fox is one of them. He combines fantastic lyrics with rhythms that make it impossible to keep still, and tops it off by producing music videos that would be fun to watch even with the volume turned down.

Plus, all of his music videos seem to feature people in monkey masks. How awesome is that?

Edit: Mario makes a good point below. I've posted a translation of the lyrics in the comments of the post at Ectomo, where I found the song.

A new word from my mother in law

My wonderful mother in law is in town for the occasion of Rose's cake-costume acquisition. I love talking to her, because she speaks a considerably more colloquial style of German than Rose does, and I learn a new word from her every ten minutes or so.

Tonight's word: verhackstückeln. It means "to negotiate," but it sounds something like "to chop to pieces." And it's one of those wonderful German words that just rattles off the tongue.

A unique order of operations

More than seven months after our marriage began under a windmill in northern Germany, my wife has just purchased her wedding dress. That's because in Germany, one wedding is not considered expensive enough, so you have to have two.

First comes the civil service, before which the government of Germany reinforces every stereotype of Teutonic bureaucracy by causing you to fill out a number of forms sufficient to build a life-size papier-mâché replica of Stonehenge. The finest moment in this process in when they make you provide a professionally translated copy of your birth certificate, which contains approximately eight words to be translated, including such difficult terms as "name" (German: Name) and "date" (Datum).

I am not as sure what the church service will be like, having never actually gotten married in a church before. Based on weddings I have seen here, there will be dancing, lovely speeches, excellent food, and a woman who's come to the ball dressed as a giant wedding cake. Only this time, inside the cake will be my wife!

I'm very excited.

Things are happening!

The days of my life flow by with breathtaking speed at times, and I am often consternated at how little I seem able to accomplish in a day. And then come days when everything seems to fall in place.

Sunday I finally finished the first draft of my master's thesis, though of course it needs a lot of work work; portions of it need to be moved to different sections, three or so chapters will be completely assimilated into their neighbors, and the length of many of my sentences, grown to unhealthy extremes by my tendency to crowd a whole legion of thoughts into the space between two periods, and to use ridiculously complex structures containing asides (and even occasional parenthetical remarks) must be, for the sake of the beauty of my prose and the reading comprehension of my poor and mostly non-native speaking audience, reduced.

In all fairness, I could have written that sentence in German using one noun and one verb, each of them a page long.

And Project II, the Search for Employment, is also off to a good start. I've just had a phone interview with a recruiter in London and will be headed downtown tomorrow to meet another. I'd rather be interviewing for jobs directly, of course, but I really want to work for a Japanese company if possible, and they seem to work mostly through recruiting agencies.

I need to get back to my thesis now. I am starting to really believe that I will be graduated and employed at the end of March. Wish me luck!

Read with great caution

Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!...
Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

Anna Karenina

I subscribe to a wonderful service called DailyLit, which divvies up open domain works and e-mails you a piece each day. It's a wonderful way for me to force myself to read classic books that I would never otherwise read; I'm currently reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which is brilliant. I wanted to quote a paragraph here that is brilliantly insightful and that I simply cannot get out of my mind since I read it.

Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them--or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.

How many of the opinions that we hold come to us in this manner? We don't have the time to form reasoned opinions on every matter, and so we flock sheep-like in the direction dictated by the opinion makers at the head of whatever group we identify with.

Short version: Tolstoy rocks. Tolstoy is hard core. Read Tolstoy.