Hacking German/Deutsch Sprachehackung

 It's the first day of August. I can't believe how quickly summer is drifting by. This morning is calm and cool, but I expect 33 degree heat later today, and a thunderstorm by the late afternoon or evening. I hope I'm wrong about that. I have been learning some more German vocabulary and grammar for about 12 consecutive days now, using around 10 to 15 minutes per lesson.

Es ist der erste Tag des August. Ich kann glauben nicht wie schell der Sommer vorbei. An diesem Morgen, die Wetter ist sehr ruhig und stille, aber ich erwarte 33 Grad für Hitze später Heute im Nachmittag oder Abend, mit ein Sturm möglich. Hoffentlich, wird das nicht so sein. Für über zwölf Tagen, ich hatte mehr Deutsch Sprache gelernt. Ich arbeite für nur 10 oder 15 Minuten jede Lektion für mehr Vokabular und Grammatik zu lernen. Das ist genug jetzt. Zu schreiben mehr in Deutsch, muss ich mehr Kaffee (oder Bier) zu trinken.

So, why another language, specifically German? My outlined answers are as follows:

1. The obvious mission – I still want to travel to Europe someday, and it only makes sense to learn that which is most commonly spoken there as the primary and secondary language. Putting that together with my English and the French and Spanish I know, and I should be able navigate around most of Western, Northern, and Central parts of that continent well enough. One could be a hopeless dork and be confined to traveling around with a tour group full of complainers who can't think outside the box (my idea of hell) who wouldn't dare to speak a word of any other language of the visited nation, and not discover anything really different from what could already be found in a guidebook. I prefer doing the total opposite and going rogue: being like a Jason Bourne and heading off the beaten path; operating independently. To do this, knowing at least the bare essentials of more than one locally spoken language is a must.
2. To make learning the "cousin" languages easier – There are the other languages of the other nations I want to visit along Northern Europe (Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian) in the same Germanic linguistic family that share a lot of the same cognates found in either English or German. Having this other German dataset should (in theory) make learning these additional regional languages easier just as knowing French, a Latin born language, made it easier for me to pick up on Spanish. Learning the complex forms of case articles, three forms of grammatical gender, and different word order would temper me up better if I really wanted to learn something even more complicated in depth like Russian or Ukrainian.
3. Cognitive Improvement – Studies are showing more and more that learning new creative skills, adapting to novelty, and solving puzzles (without too much stress) and testing the working memory are the best things that can be done for stimulating the brain enough to ward off things like dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Learning a foreign language covers all these bases. It's a cheap form of prevention that I can do now that may keep me from suffering hard later. I take the issue of preventing geriatric mental illness a little more seriously than most. It's because I currently don't (and possibly wouldn't) have a trusted life-partner around to take care of me if ever I should become chronically ill, or ever need help to guide me along if ever my mental gears started slipping due to anything age-related in the future. I've worked long enough in health care to see what the real personal and social costs of cognitive impairment are, and how I don't ever want to be rendered into some zombie-like, dementia-stricken elder with no grasp on reality, or left at that the mercy of a system whose only answer to deal with you in such a state is to over-medicate you and shut you away. My inspiration came from hearing about a lady who was in her nineties who was still learning other languages, and she was still very cogent and bright during her interview.
4. It ultimately helps me to speak my own language better (or at least makes me recognize the ways I use it poorly) – when I stepped outside my box to learn Spanish years ago, it struck me as to how badly I use the subjunctive tense in English when I compared the two languages. Learning German now helps me to clearly see the functional difference between accusative and dative cases as it is so much more necessary to be aware of using them precisely when speaking German, which I wouldn't have learned as readily or adequately if it was explained to me in an English lesson.
5. To fit my idea of personal betterment – when I take into account the most interesting people that I've ever met in my life that I had the pleasure to engage in amazing conversations with, they had mostly these characteristics: they were bright, but in a way that had nothing to do with the number of years they spent in University, they were "richer" people, but it had nothing to do with the measure of the material wealth that they had, some were less well off than me. The one overlapping element they all had in common, which I believe made them bright and "rich" with experience, was the fact that they all could speak more than two languages, which effectively made them wiser with a grander world view of things. To learn another language automatically puts you in the place of having to find another way of thinking or perceiving things. I find myself envying those who are able to think and dream in more than one language, I think that's a fantastic mental talent to have. I'm hopelessly inconvenienced with only being able to think and dream in English. To be able to speak another language or two fluently really is hard to do without a reasonable amount of social intelligence: another enviable quality to have, which is probably what made those other people's company so enjoyable. German's distinction in the role of human betterment, despite having a relatively small number of worldwide speakers compared to Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and English, is that it's the second most used language for scientific publications. Using time to learn another language is the only time when I feel like my brain is actually growing, unlike other times when I'm just passively absorbing and then regurgitating other trivial stuff.
6. It forces me to become a better listener – something that I wish all people could learn how to do better (myself included).
7. Because learning another language is becoming cheaper and easier to do than ever – thanks to cross-comparing my ability with apps like Google Translate, and Duolingo, I can drill and test myself at my own pace.
8. A 30 day program project - It also all part of a 30 day program to see how much I'm able to learn, and to test my ability to commit to it that long. Learning German is challenging enough to force me to re-think things and to be transformational, and yet harmless enough that if I fail at it the consequences won't be too harsh.
9. I'll learn something that won't go obsolete – the only things that I feel I learned in school that have never escaped me and served me most practically were basic mathematics and the ability to tactfully and correctly use language, which is useful in a highly technical world for. . .
10. Building programming competence and confidence – making an effort to understand something which would ordinarily look and sound like garble to you and then putting into some functional and logical order to get something done is the very essence of computer programming. I strongly believe that you have to have some proficiency with practicing this with human languages first before you can even apply it into controlling something as stupid as a box full of silicon chips.

I'm doubtful that I'll ever learn enough German to be fluent enough to understand the great intellects like Goethe, Thomas Mann, or Einstein; to read their actual thoughts in their own words. That's not my ultimate mission. I just hope to know enough to be understood when I need to make requests, or ask for directions. If I re-translated my little composition above, I'm sure I'll find glaring mistakes. The case articles and genders are the hardest things for me to understand as an Anglophone learning German, but I'm trying. I'll see if and how I'll improve after the 30 days has past.