The Tin Drum/Die Blechtrommel

[celtic_tigress]

So, have any of you Germans out there read the book "Die Blechtrommel", by Guenter Grass? (PS-I don't know how to type umlauts on a regular keyboard, can you tell?) I am reading it for one of my English classes, and obviously we have a translation. So, I thought perhaps one of you could tell me if it still comes across well in English, if you've

Comments

"Umlaute"

[anonymous]

Hey!

I read your message and thought i should comment on it - so i'm doing. I'm from Germany but never read Die Blechtrommel - i didn't even see the film. But i'll try to tell you something about Umlaute. In Germany we have different keyboards that include these letters - i often wonder what is there on a english keyboard instead. You should try to use word or another program to add the Umlaute as symbols. Or just write them like you did already, everybody will understand why.

Your web side is one of my favorite and i really like your reading out "The best things in live are free" - I listen to it to improve my comprehension ;-)

Hope, you aren't totally frightened of my bad use of English

PS.: I'm sorry for being anonymous but i'm not a LiveJournal user yet.

Re: "Umlaute"

[celtic_tigress]

I thought there might be a difference with German keyboards, but I didn't know you had entirely different keys for umlaut letters. I know you can copy and paste ue, oe, etc. from Word, but I'm kind of lazy and that takes too long. :) Oh well, as long as using an 'e' to denote the umlaut is commonly accepted, I guess I will stick with that.

Thank you so much for listening! I'm glad the recording is helping you improve your English. Believe me, I know how hard it is to learn a foreign language; I took three years of German in high school and your English is so much better than my German it isn't even funny. Don't worry about bad grammar too much. You are getting your point across, and that is the important thing.

I can't say I would recommend becoming a LJ user right now, they have been having a lot of problems lately, but I understand how hard it is to move around LJ when you aren't a user. I just hope you see this reply, since there won't be a notice sent to you!