Before I started this diary I really doubted wether to write it in English or in German, my 'langue natal'. To write in german made not much sense to me, because the main diary comunity is english speaking & I could'n'would only reach a small group of readership. Whoever reads a n norwegian or slowenian online diary? Surely only just some very few aquaintances of the same small spot in the world the author comes from.
You know - I found diaryland by the 'Harald Schmidt Show' & especially by Gentry Lane. Harald Schmidt has a late night show in Germany with slight but evident similarity to the 'Letterman show' - He was reading in his show about a week or two from her diary, raising curiosity in his audience (me too) about this evidently exciting young Lady, a jewish californian girl with russian ancestors , living in Paris as fashion designer with a strange adiction to 'G�tz Alsmann'. She had then this diary 'freuds-fave.diaryland.com'.
She was invited in his show & since then I became her daily reader. But you can visit her diary on 'culotte.diaryland.com', her new diary, since she closed freuds-fave last summer. She has her own fashion line with panties meanwhile & is to be referred as the 'Lucky Panty Queen' of Paris.
OK, I can read english books fluently, but I know my writing is much worse, but my talking english is still worse, because I'm totally out of practice in talking.
I had three years english in school, but learned and improved my english mainly by listening to rock, pop etc. So my Rock'n'Roll Heroes taught me english.
Later on in another decade of my life, I visited a friend in Massachussets and lived there for 3 months. There I started reading english books. Actually I started with books for children 'Mother Goose', Stories of little rabbits & hares etc. later on 'The last Unicorn' by Beagle etc.
After I realised that I could enter with my new ability to read in english the whole english & american literature in origin, I bought a lot of english books in MA, e.g. E.A.Poe's & Lewis Carroll collected tales, the Tolkien trilogy etc. & sent them to Germany. Later on back in Germany, I read a lot of english books from the library or bought them on some bookstores. But in bookstores only a very poor choice of english was available & they were (still are) so expensive, twice or thrice the price a German book would cost. Anyway books are much more expensive here than in the USA.
But then came internet & amazon & all the books of the whole world were within short time available & cheap enough to order them all!
Most of the english books I can read fluently - Lewis Carroll was a pleasure to read - the german translation is so much poorer, because all the little word plays Carroll was fond of got lost by translation.
Or how could you translate 'a mouse tale (tail) - 'uglification' - and - 'no fish would go anywhere without a porpoise' - or about the 'whiting' doing the shoes and boots..
these books & a lot of science fiction stories were easy to read, but once I lent Henry Miller from the library - one of those books Plexus, Sexus, Nexus - & the language was so elaborate and difficult - so much words I 'd had to look in my dictionary, that I gave up. The same happened to E.A. Poe stories in english (Poe uses a lot of these old english words, adverbs etc.) . I gave up then. But that was about 10 years ago. May my english has meantimes improved so much, that I'll succeed if I try over again. & I will try, truy, trie...
