Piso Mojado

I have studied the German language. In fact, the last book that I read was "501 German verbs" in the Barron's Foreign Language Series. I was quite proud of having finished that book. I thought it would make me relatively fluent. Not even close. I'm a little bit better at German, but I am nowhere near the level I would like to attain. I've always been a poor student. I learn. I forget. I re-learn. I forget.

I am an Amerikaner in an area where a great many foreign languages are spoken, Chinese (Mandarin) chief among them. On my last 10-person work team was one person born in France and one born in Germany. At lunch I practiced my Mandarin with a very nice woman whose family had long ago immigrated from the island of Taiwan. I have a lot of opportunity to practice the speech of other cultures.

Nevertheless, unless I am hit by a bolt from the sky and develop a super-memory, I expect that I will continue to write in English. Perhaps some day I will have enough sales that I will be able to hire a translator, or perhaps someone in my extended family (a large one that embraces dozens of cultures) will volunteer to transform my books into German. I remember the young German teen-ager who wrote to me excitedly in perfectly grammatical English just as Valentine's Day approached, "Tomorrow I am going to donate my heart to my boyfriend!"

I can envison myself making many of these types of errors if I were trying to write in German.