Skip to content →

Das ist ein Brief

Dear Rosetta Stone,

I want to write to my mother in German and talk to her about her favorite topic: Me.

I want to bring her immeasurable happiness by telling her what I ate, tell her I am walking, and I want to tell her I am not swimming. I will also tell her I am not riding a bicycle. If I read a newspaper, I would like to tell her that too.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to share anything about myself yet, because the pronoun “I” is not covered in the first two hours of Core Lesson 1.

I know:
The girl: Das Madchen
The boy: Der Junge
The woman: Die Frau
The man: Der Mann
They: Sie

But I do not know, “I,” nor how to conjugate it, arguably the most important of all. My mother will find it very curious if I recap my day by only describing what other people do.

Let me be clear: if I only present information about other people to her, in broken German, she will suspect I am hiding something. And when my mother thinks I’m hiding something, she frets. And then with the persistence of a strongly motivated FBI agent, who is willing to cut corners for answers to questions the brass is too scared to ask, she will get to the bottom of what I may be hiding. She will brutally interrogate my siblings, exhaust my husband’s patience, and write desperate, threatening emails. And I will have to explain, IN ENGLISH – SO FORGET ABOUT PRACTICING ANY NEWLY LEARNED GERMAN, that I could not write about myself, because you did not include the pronoun “I” in the first two hours of the course. Who knows if she will believe this truth.

Please consider incorporating “I” and relevant conjugations earlier into the curriculum.

Kind regards,

A Person Who Bought Your Software Years Ago and Only Started Using it Recently

Published in Advice Column Thoughtful Reflection

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *