Sponsored Journey through German Fiction

As I described in my previous post, I have called off my plans to go on a massive walking challenge.  However, I still want to fundraise to support Ukrainian refugees.

Equally, I would still like to take up some sort of personal challenge.  There don’t seem to be any rules on what you can invite people to sponsor you to do.  I recently saw an article in a local paper about a man called Rob Hendra who has shaved off his beard to raise money for the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Ukraine appeal through Tearfund.  If you are interested in supporting him or finding out more, please click on this link.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of facial hair to start with.  However, what I would like to challenge myself to do, if I’m not going to be stretching my body’s limits with lots of walking, is to stretch my brain by practising reading German.

A quarter of a century ago, I managed to learn enough German in two years to scrape through the GCSE exam.  Five years ago, as I described in a previous post, I taught myself enough German to be able to read A Griffin’s Feather in the original German because I couldn’t wait until the translation came out and just had to know how my favourite characters from Dragon Rider were getting on.

I even started going to evening classes in conversational German.  On one occasion, we were given a homework assignment to write an essay about what makes life easy or difficult when you move to a different country.  Inspired by this, I wrote two fanfiction novels, Twigleg’s Diary and The Clay Soldier, imagining life for Dragon Rider’s human hero Ben and his homunculus friend Twigleg after they move to Britain to live with Ben’s new adoptive family.

After that, though – my interest in practising my language skills tailed off.  It wasn’t encouraging that when PDB11 and I went on holiday to Germany in 2018 and stayed with PDB11’s friend Hans, whom I tried to talk to in German, my accent was so bad that Hans had to ask me to speak English so that he could understand me!  If I had been sensible, this would have been a reason to go back to evening classes, listen to German audiobooks, and try to get a feel for the spoken language, but instead I gave in to laziness.

However, I want to get back to learning.  Apart from anything else, in the past couple of years, PDB11 has been attempting a new career as a translator of German fantasy fiction, working his way through the Drachenhof Feuerfels series by Derek Meister, and has even found time to write a fanfic, Dragon Student (in English), introducing the Feuerfels world to English-speaking readers.  I’m enjoying reading PDB11’s translations as he writes them, but I want to be able to enter his world further by reading the originals.

So, if I’m looking for a personal challenge and trying to link it to the situation of refugees fleeing to a new country and having to learn the local language, then I plan to ask people to sponsor me to read German books for the rest of 2022. 

I have set up a JustGiving page where you can donate to Disasters Emergency Committee or UNHCR.  Alternatively, you can go to the websites of the Disaster Emergency Committee and the UN Refugee Agency where you can choose whether to donate specifically to their Ukraine appeals, to a different appeal, or to their general funds to help all those who are in need.  Or if you want to help a group of Ukrainian refugees in the UK, you can go to Vicki Bridges’ appeal for those in Oakhill.  I truly don’t mind which you do, as long as the money is doing some good for someone who needs it.

I don’t know how many books I can pledge to read, but I promise to keep everyone updated.  For now, I’ll set myself a target of reading one German book a month – seven books by Christmas, as I am already partway through May’s book – and see how that works out in practice. 

This may not sound like much of a challenge compared to ten hours of walking per day.  But in practice, it’s harder because normal life doesn’t stop for it.  If I’m out on a long walk every day, this is a convenient excuse to abandon normal household tasks like cooking and washing up.  I can live on sandwiches or eat out in pubs and cafés, and PDB11 can fend for himself and subsist on jacket potatoes or vegetarian kievs.  And if it’s only for a month, then that doesn’t seem so unreasonable. 

By contrast, setting aside time to practise reading German for the rest of the year, and balancing this with everything else we need to do (including finding some time to go for walks, and going to car boot sales to sell off some of the assorted boxes of junk that have been blocking up the house for years) requires me to get organised.

Why don’t I ask people to sponsor me to do something useful instead?  Well, it depends what you mean by ‘useful’.  Most things we do to improve ourselves make us more useful members of society.  Just as exercising helps me stay physically healthy (and therefore, with luck, to put less of a strain on the NHS), so learning a foreign language helps me not to be just another self-satisfied Anglophone who expects the rest of the world to speak my language.

One disadvantage of a sponsored read compared to a sponsored walk is that it doesn’t offer much scope for taking photographs to decorate my blog.  However, I am definitely going to be writing blog posts about my impressions of the books I read.  Be warned that these will contain spoilers – but I’ll try not to give everything away!

I’ll start with the book I am currently reading, Drachenerwachen by Valija Zinck.  But this needs another post.