Day 460 of German
It took me three days to work through the transcript of the Tagesschau broadcast from October 17th.
My learning platform, LingQ, has been buggy: the text underlining feature—which normally follows the audio—disappears whenever I pause to look up a word or process a sentence. To work around this, I now read the entire transcript first for comprehension, then listen to the audio with the text-tracking enabled. This method helps, but the platform friction certainly doesn’t speed things up.
Last week, I felt great about my listening comprehension because the crisis in the Gaza Strip dominated the news for weeks, giving me consistent exposure to the same core vocabulary. Now, the news cycle has shifted, and I’m encountering a whole new set of terms. Even factoring in work and life obligations, taking over three days just to understand a single 15-minute news broadcast is rather discouraging.
On the bright side, one news item was mildly amusing. I learned that Austria has a Fuel Price Fixing Act (Spritpreisverordnung) that prevents gas stations from increasing the price more than once a day (though they can decrease it freely). Germany, however, lacks this regulation, meaning prices can fluctuate several times daily. Many would like to see Austria’s Spritpreisverordnung introduced in Germany. One person in Germany’s Baden-Württemberg complained that this back-and-forth must stop:
Herbert Palme in Tübingen findet, das Hin und Her an der Zapfsäule muss bald aufhören.
What I find amusing is that someone has the patience to observe gas prices all day just to track the fluctuation. I wish I had that kind of time on my hands! That kind of focused observation is a luxury, but my own daily Hin und Her—that constant back-and-forth and distraction—is just the reality of language learning.