Back from a very productive, apparently, ride in several forms of public transportation - well, I'm just dying to share the discoveries I made while reading the German book.

1. So I knew what TV was called and probably at least intuited how to say "to watch TV", but I finally saw it in a book - "fernsehen". Or in the present tense "ich sehe fern". Which literally translates to "I see far"... or, I suppose, you could also say "I see out there".

2. I came across a verbal construction about which I just learned from the grammar book, and without that knowledge I wouldn't know what to do with that construction (or at the very least interpret it completely wrong)... I'm actually kind of frightened by this. It was listed as one of only 3 ways to use Partizip I, and I knew nothing about it after who knows how many hundred hours of German Youtube videos watched, and several unadapted books read... And I must have encountered (and misinterpreted) it at least once before.

3. It suddenly occurred to me that one of the difficulties with German is that a lot of the same roots get reused for widely different phenomena. It's true for English to some extent (for example, "stand" vs. "understand"). But I think in German the situation is "worse" (if only for this argument) because, I believe, it has pretty much always belonged to a dominant nation (from the time of the Holy Roman Empire) and only imposed itself on other languages, as opposed to English, which had to at least compromize with different languges multiple times. In English often even similar meanings get completely different stems - like "to come" and "to arrive". But in German it's "kommen" and "ankommen". I often get confused and can't tell if that's a word I already know or one with a slightly different meaning, or something completely new.