I speak three languages: Czech, English and Very-Loud-Czech. The last one is used in Pratchett’s way to communicate with aliens; if they don’t understand, repeat the sentence again in your primary language and more loudly. By the way, according to my experience across the world, it works surprisingly well, especially in Spain!
They tried to force-learn me German in school for some seven years. That’s why I know only “Guten Tag” and “donnerwetterkrucifixhimmelherrgotthimbajselement”. Actually, the second phrase I use as a curse word and is probably not proper German anyway. But it basically resonates with my feeling that German language is well-suited only for orders and cursing. Maybe, if Ms.Honalová, my German teacher in elementary school, would use another teaching methods than pained expressions on her face, the results would be different ;-)
It seems that Ludwig’s caning method worked pretty well for teaching Niki Flynn German numerals! He describes the event in his recent blog post. In a vain attempt to divert attention of international spanking community from his own well-earned punishment, he published video recording of the above mentioned session.
Lupus Pictures helped him with hosting the video on our download servers, so you may enjoy it for free:
By the way: I should probably expand the list of good uses of German by ancient incantations and metal music lyrics. For example in songs of German band In Extremo. They use traditional medieval lyrics in various strange languages like Occitan, Gaelic, Icelandic, Old Swedish, Old French, Middle High German, Old High German, and Latin. And they mix traditional medieval instruments and arrangement with modern metal and rock, which seems strange at first, but the outcome is surprisingly great.
In the video above you may see their live performance of “Ai vis a lo lop”. It’s the right song for a spanking werewolf, because it’s name means “I saw a wolf” in Occitan language.
But I still don’t understand, what the singer says in the video ;-)
Current mood: musical; Current music: Kivimetsän Druidi - Pohjoinen Mahti