Neil Bartlett writes:

This is the first in a series of posts that I wrote approx. 2 years ago when I spent some time in Vienna -- with occassional shuttles to and from Toronto. At the time, I had a blog and intended to put the posts on the blog but never did. In re-reading them recently, I realized they cover topics I still want to write about. Topics such as learning German and the Germanic culture; Topics I knew little about before going to Vienna.

For the record, I enjoyed and still enjoy learning German immensely. After about a year of elapsed time (not all spent in Vienna) I had reached the point of reading novels in the language so I feel I reached a reasonable level of proficiency. This series of posts is about things both mainstream and arcane that occured as I went through the process of absorbing another language.

[...] After a while, I noticed that using only about 15-20 phrases -- say 30-40 words -- got you by in a large number of daily social interactions. Most curiously, these words were often not in the beginners books. At least not until book 2 or 3. In the meantime in book 1 you learn desparately useful stuff such as parts of the body and how to talk to your grandma in German (despite the fact that my Grandma is dead and spoke, to my recollection, only English.)