11:40 - Dump laundry in washer
11:45 - Attempt to make lunch
12:45 - The water finally started to boil for my spaghetti
1:30-2:30 Meet Susan Reber for hot chocolate and German conversation at the Conditorei
3:15-4:45 - German Class
5:15 - Dinner
5:30-6:30 - Practice
Although I had some good practicing today, I ended up just giving myself a break, which I really need to recharge. Within a couple of days, I went from feeling very comfortable to "überwhelmed." I have a ton of music to learn. I'm happy to have the opportunity to perform this Monday evening, but with it being a last minute notification, it really disrupts the feng shui of my organizational and functional qi. As a result, I think my body and mind decided to shut down. I decided not to take about it much this evening, and I'm enjoying the night off anyway
In other news, I'm happy with my German learning curve. For having been here for less than two weeks, I am finding that I'm starting to understand a lot more of what I hear. I still freeze in many real life German conversations, but my level of familiarity at least increases everyday. It'd be neat to see where I end up at the end. Some things that really holding me back are my lack of deliberate compartmentalization of masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns; the appropriate attachment of articles; the lack of understanding of conjunctions and prepositions; and my overall lack of vocabulary!!!
Additionally, I find that I really enjoy studying languages. In light of having conversations in French, Vietnamese, and German, I have become more motivated to improve my fluency for each. In reality, I probably will only work on German while I am here. It would be nice if I could find a career in which I am pursuing music but am able to cater to my penchant for linguistics. Opera répétiteur-ing seems to fit that description, but I think it would kill my hands and piano technique to do that kind of playing all the time.
Opera coach Bill Reber was telling me that a friend of his who plays for opera would often take a lot of time off after playing operas to work on only Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn for a couple of months to rebuild finer piano technique. On the one hand, it's amazing to see what opera pianists can sight-read. On the other, a lot of times it's a lot of loud playing that sounds pianistically awful and painful. My conversation with him on this topic made me much more interested in and inspired to pursue really taking my etudes seriously to work on my chops. I'm really looking forward to narrowing on technique as a focal point for my masters at IU.
Anyhow, I am thinking about creating a list of German verbs, adjectives, and nouns to organize my study of German as I encounter these words. Perhaps I will post them somewhere on this blog if that is possible, then you faithful or occasional stalkers can learn what I'm studying, too! We'll see if I find time for that.
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