"A mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension. "
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sounds great and inspiring, doesn't it? Except for one problem: stretching one's mind to take in new ideas is really hard!
When I studied German, my class found itself fighting a very difficult
mental battle. No, we weren't reading Goethe or anything amazingly
advanced. We had the worst trouble learning one of the most basic parts of German: the different noun forms.
Doesn't sound too complicated, right? Except that German uses a
completely different system than English does. The German nouns have
unique endings depending on their function in the sentence:
Nominative Nouns are the subject. (N)
Genitive Nouns show possession. (G)
Dative Nouns are for the indirect object. (D)
Accusative Nouns are for the indirect object. (A)
Raise your hand, native English speakers, if what I just wrote is basically all Greek to you!
(Actually, be glad it wasn't Greek! That language is even worse, with 24 distinctly different ways to say the word 'the'. I know this because I somehow thought it would be "fun" to learn ancient Greek! I was wrong.)
Back to my grammatical torture. Don't worry, there is a point to this.
So, the fun of German is that you can have the same exact word--and have it spelled completely differently based on where it is in the sentence.
For example:
The friend (N) gave the friend (A) of the friend (G) to the friend (D).
Der Freund (N) gibt den Freund (A) des Freundes (G) dem Freund (D).
Those d words I italicized up there, they all mean "the" in German, by the way. And that's only if the friend is male, and there's only one of him. Change the gender, and it gets even worse.
Does your head hurt yet? Good! That's the entire goal for my evil grammar lesson.
In other words, I was torturing you to make a point!
It's extremely
tough for native English speakers to get our minds around such a completely different grammatical structure at first.
What makes it worse is that the Germans have absolutely no problem with it. (A point that irks the hell out of me when a 2 year old speaks much better German than I do.)
When we try to force our minds to understand, they immediately start screaming at us: "What do you
mean there is more than one way to say 'the'???"
And then we experience the painful process of staring blankly at a piece of paper, completely clueless about what "the" to use in our simple sentence.
(At least I do. You could easily be smarter than me.)
The reason this is interesting for creative enthusiasts is that this is a very similar process to accepting new ideas.
When someone comes up with a radically new concept, our minds
automatically jump into "that won't work" mode. It doesn't fit with our
current way of thinking and we have a hard time seeing how it can be possible.
That's why it was so hard for people to accept that the world was round. That's why they couldn't believe that the earth actually moved around the sun, instead of vise versa.
Everything they knew told them that those new concepts were impossible.
Throughout history, there have been a lot of impossible things that were proved wrong. And, each time, after the initial surge of rejection, those new ideas seeped their way into people's realities until they became accepted.
Each time, people's minds were forced (uncomfortably) to stretch far beyond their original dimensions. And each time, those minds grew and expanded beyond what they had been before.
And eventually, a new idea became easy to think about, and easy to accept.
Just like I'm hoping my brain will eventually expand enough to accept the German language.
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