German is in, Java is out

To be frank, I don't have much knowledge of foreign languages. Of course, I know a little French e.g. Parlez vous is the name given to the Parle-G biscuits which are exported to Paris. ich (German for I) is the cute sound which one of my friends makes when she sneezes. Puta is Spanish for umm... well... never mind. The point is that I have never learnt a language in its entirety. And that's what I'm about to do now. I'm planning to learn German. Actually its not a new thing. I have been trying to learn German since my college days. Thought that learning a new language would improve my resumé. But time and other constraints caused me to put such grandiose ideas aside and dive back into my engineering books. In the struggle to learn Java and C++, the quest to learn German went kaput.

The second wave started during my project days. SAP was implemented in the company I was doing project in, and again I dreamt big dreams of going to Germany for SAP training. Thus having a working knowledge of German would have helped me converse freely with the 'Germanese'. That stint again was short-lived.

As far as I can remember there were a couple of stints more, dictated by the situations and the spurs of the moment. But all these stints didn't help in any way. Considering my limited German vocabulary, a Yahoo chat conversation would go like:-

Me: Guten Morgen/Guten Tag
German: Guten Morgen! Wie gehst du heute?
Me: Umm... well... uh... Auf Wiedersehen.

*Click* *Click* *Log-off*

But now this bhoot of learning German has again taken over me. So I have downloaded the Complete Idiot's Guide to learning German (Extra Idioticity Edition), and this book coupled with the Internet will help me learn this authoritative language. Then I'll have a multilingual blog. Then I'll get visitors from Germany. Then I'll be ... (beta niche aaja). Anyways, if nothing else I'll feel good at learning something new.

So, Auf Wiedersehen for now, and ja, to the foot-in-the-grave politician I was talking about recently, du bist ein schwarzes Schwein (Tsk tsk. I can see you running to Google Translate. Chalo uski bhi link de deta hu).