AMD 6 Tony

It is certainly a waste not to read some of the German (or of Germanic country origin) philosophers' works. Recently I am fascinated by some of the arguments by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of course, my math skill is not even close to being sufficient to understand the very derivation of his arguments, but reading merely the conclusions is exciting enough. Thanks to the basic grammar that we have learned, I can read some of his arguments in his "Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung" in German. The most famous one among those probably is "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." I wouldn't really try to understand sentence by sentence, since even the English speakers back in his time had some trouble figuring out which meaning of specific words Wittgenstein actually took.

Another thing I did for fun is reading the script of the opera der Ring des Nibelungen (before the last chapter, I wouldn't be able to really know the genitive possessive usage of the pronouns). The read half of the first scene, in which the three Rhinetöchter teased the Zweig intruder, Alberich. It is very interesting to read the script in German, and when I compare the German to the English translation next to each line, I found that the English translation is not really accurate. I don't mean that it has to be literal translation, but sometimes when it wouldn't be awkward at all to be literally translated, the translator still had his very own version of the meaning. That strongly encourages me to learn more about German and potentially other languages, so then I can really appreciate other literature and culture in their own language setting, but not always in English and Chinese, no matter how wonderful the job the translators have done.