And because I'm feeling inspired...

and also because I don't want to attempt to read my Chemistry textbook in order to study for the test I have to attempt (and ultimately fail) tomorrow, you get a bonus blog post for this week!

Here are a few of my favorite German words/phrases and their translations/explanations:

1. Echt. This word means real or really and is generally used as an exclamation/question combination. When someone says something unbelievable or unusual or exciting, someone might say 'echt?!?!?' in response. I find this incredibly amusing and I tend to use the word a lot. You could also say that my photo with Barack Obama, for example, is echt - he isn't a wax figure. I've had to say that a lot here, haha.

2. Doch. We don't have a word for this in English, but it essentially means 'On the contrary.' So, when someone asks a negative question in German, such as 'Didn't you go to the store?', the correct answer to the question when you did in fact go to the store is not 'ja', but rather 'doch' ('on the contrary, I DID go to the store'). This avoids all of the double negative confusion we have in English, because technically if you said 'yes' to that question, it would mean that you DIDN'T go to the store. The double negative 'no' answer would mean that you did in fact go to the store. Phew. That one is hard to explain. I hope that makes sense! So instead of arguments consisting of like 'yes!' 'no!' 'yes!' 'no!' they consist of 'nein!' 'doch!' 'nein!' 'doch!' I find this extremely funny.

3. Egal/Es ist mir egal. We also don't have this one in English! Loosely, egal means 'doesn't matter.' Es ist mir egal means 'It doesn't matter to me.' But it's so much easier to say egal than it is to say 'it doesn't matter.'

4. Gleich. Gleich means equal, but it also means 'In a moment.' Again, we don't have an exact translation. When you say 'Ich gehe gleich' it means that you will be going within the next 2-3 minutes. And this is Germany, so you'd better be on time.

5. Gar nicht. I say this one all the time, mostly because I love how it sounds. It means 'Not at all.'

More may be coming later, but now I need to attempt to read about electron pair bonding in a foreign language. Bleh.

Bis dann!