(TFT) Re: TFT Digest V3 #193

[Nils K Hammer <nh0g+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Languages, I'm too old, depressed, poor, and out of practice to
create a mathematical model for FRPG right now, but my personal
experiences might be useful. US army 1976 - 77 I had 8 months
of german language, ~35 hours of class per week. Upon landfall
Germany I declared "hey, they taught me the wrong language"!

I learned from this that book learning, even with real German
teachers, is not the same as regular folks talking, smokin' &
joking. There was an adjustment period where my real life
experience turned my theory into practice. There were many
little "aha!" experiences.

Then in year 2000, over 20 years later, I went on an art tour
for 2 weeks. Over a period of a couple of days my German skill
reactivated, in a fashion similar to the theory-practice thing,
but it was much more comfortable this time, maybe just because
I'm less intense nowadays. The skill never got to be uniformly
high, but it was never complete in the first place. I seem to
have been rolling the occaisional "critical hit" which opened
old doors to the skill. My high point was at Schloss Rabenstein
at the "Die Ritter sind Zueruek" museum display. There was one
particular suit of armour that my armour-smith needed to see,
and photos were prohibited. With my mere 10 days of German
reactivation experience, I "rolled" a real world "critical hit"
in fast talk, logic, culture, justice, or something. The shop
girl didn't have the power to grant us photo rights, and I
didn't want to push her too far. What she did was give us lots
of presents to compensate us, giant photo-posters of a knight
on horseback.

Nils K. Hammer


=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"