[Magdalen] Homing Pigeons.

[Scott Knitter]

Yes...I tend to think of Finns as people of quite lovely skin. This
was certainly true of Juha and Gisela, the exchange students in my
senior German class.

Not sure what they were doing in that class, but there were a delight
to meet. They could have taught me. All I helped them with was
pronunciation, I think...mainly niceties of accent. I fretted over
whether I was getting all the noun genders right, but I could do a
really good native German pronunciation. What a year of immersion in
German could have done. The three weeks I had over there were
astounding. Back home I did a lot of recording and imitating
newsreaders. Our short-term exchange student happened upon a cassette
with one of my recordings and said I had no accent whatsoever. Not
sure whether I admitted I was imitating a newsreader precisely. That
exercise did help a great deal...helps get one's mouth around the
right sounds and rhythms. I had a university German professor (an
American) who could have used some of that sort of practice. I tried
to stick with native Germans for profs but that wasn't always
possible.

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 3:23 PM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
> A friend of ours taught high school up in Aurora, MN, which has a large
> Finnish population with a strong sauna tradition. He swore you could tell
> which of the kids' families had saunas, because those kids always had the
> most beautiful skin and never had acne, whether they were particularly
> goodlooking or not.




-- 
Scott R. Knitter
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA