Hara-kiri-bo

(view gallery)

On the last UK tour I watched the entire series of Heroes in a few days. That's how I was passing my time and by the end of it I felt strangely empty. I figured I'd make more productive use of my time while in Germany and have been making an effort to learn the language. Bob, Guy and I have learned the 100 most used English words as a start. Once I had those down I figured it might be a good idea to try and read a book in German so I bought a Hans Christian Andersen book. I started with it the other morning and it took me about half an hour to get through the first 6 lines. When I checked my translation with our tour manager, Holger, I found that my accuracy left something to be desired. To be fair though it was fairly random. What I'd translated as:

"The troll had a mirror made that was good and well crafted and he could see himself in it"
Holger told me was:
"The troll had a mirror made and it was crafted in such a way that anything good, when reflected in it, would shrink to nothing"

As if I'm going to get that. He also told me that it was written in old style German so it wasn't going to be much use to me.

We stopped at a service station today. I spotted some books on a rack and flicked through some. I picked up a Dan Brown book and turned to the middle. I thought I understood the first sentence I read so I bought it on impulse. I sat and tried to read it while Bob ate a sausage. Once more my attempts at translation were sadly lacking and after 10 minutes of failing to understand a single word I gave it to Holger.

Next step - Michel Thomas language course.....

The photo is nothing to do with books or German but I thought it was another good example of badly thought out marketing. The giant boy has no legs, only one arm (which is upside down and looks like it wants to be holding a knife) and the bags of Haribo goodness look like his insides are hanging out. Maybe he's the Hara-kiri-bo boy.

J