With each page I turned I felt I was reading my own story, taking place in the country just west across an unmanned border from where I was sitting. Turnbull, an Australian, had married a Frenchman and moved to Paris. It was called “ Almost French,” by Sarah Turnbull. I don’t remember who told me about it, but I do remember that when I began reading it I was enthralled. Not long after I arrived I discovered a newly published book. Why was a little girl given a neutral article ( das), a loaf of bread male ( der) and a fork feminine ( die)? It was worse than Sister Mary’s high school algebra class. In German, there are approximately six ways to say “the,” but you have to know which version goes with which word. Even more mind numbing was the assignment of articles to nouns, having to memorize genders that never made sense. I learned-or tried to learn but never really quite grasped-grammatical rules like compound nouns, which are several words strung together to make one word longer than the alphabet. I spent my first three sweltering months in Germany sitting in steamy classroom enduring a five-hour-a day language immersion course with students from Turkey, Greece, Romania, Russia, and Ecuador. One of the first German words I learned, a word that still sticks with me the way the layers of sweat did that summer, was Hitzewelle. It was the year Europe had record-breaking triple-digit temperatures. In June 2003, I moved to Stuttgart, Germany to marry a smart and sexy automotive engineer, Marcus.
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