Thursday, August 04, 2005
(11:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
On the advantages and disadvantages of Nietzsche for life
I have reestablished some semblance of routine: now I am spending an hour or so every morning working on my reading of Nietzsche in German, in preparation for the language exam, before I begin the labor in which I am gainfully employed. I have so far attained a rate of 1.5 pages per hour--still well within the "excruciatingly slow, basically useless" range. With French, I have managed to attain ten times that rate, at least if I'm reading books in the genre to which I am accustomed (novels and probably books in other fields would be slow-going at first, due to vocab issues), but that's after over a year (plus I skipped over the small matters of speaking, listening, writing, etc). If German is to be useful for more than tracking down a sentence or two in the original, I'll have to attain that same level. Hopefully before my coursework reaches the critical mass where keeping up on German starts to look like one of the primary time-saving options, my German will have reached the critical mass where it is no longer painful to stay in practice -- painful like it is, for instance, now.Nietzsche was probably a fine choice for my first "real" reading text, in the long run. I'm taking a course on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in the fall, so it's immediately relevant. There is one small problem, however: when Nietzsche was writing, German apparently had a slightly different spelling system. It's very informative on a philological level, but at the same time, I don't really have the familiarity with the language to be able to say, "Oh, this looks close enough to this word." This leads to more dictionary work as I have to try out multiple possibilities for certain words. Plus he seems to have different ideas about capitalization, which partly offsets the German advantage of having all nouns capitalized.
And also, I just don't like German as much as French. Perhaps this will pass.
