Heather R

“I looked at Internet images of those ice-age lakes in and around Berlin, and their strange German names: Schlachtensee, Wannsee, Müggelsee, Plötzensee. So they call their lake see (sea). And they call their sea meer. Curiously non-English, I thought. This was of course obvious. German is different from English. But still, I realised, I was encountering a third language. This was very different from learning English, because English was always in the atmosphere like pollen from the plants permeating the air, whereas German was like a specific mountain in the landscape which you had to have a particular ambition to climb.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Lover's Discourse: A Novel