#Insurmountable love in a sentence windows#

‘King’ and ‘queen’ were easy because we often heard about Queen Elizabeth II whose husband was King Phillip. Not only that it had a little ‘steeple’ on the roof. I put the words ‘corn’ and ‘flower’ together and realised how two words could become one with a different meaning. With great determination, some luck, and lots of guesswork, I found to my surprise that I could make some sense of many of the words in the opening paragraphs of ‘The Little Mermaid’.įor, example, I knew ‘cornflower’ because my parents planted corn and I was familiar with the flowers. Not very exact, I must say, but you can get by until you have a dictionary.

After all, if you come across a new or strange word in a sentence, but you know the meaning of the parts of the sentence before and after the word, you can sort of guess the meaning of the unknown word. Anyway, even if I had a dictionary then, I don’t think I would know what to do with it.īe that as it may, I now know that with lots of patience, perseverance and a bit of creativity, it is not impossible to learn without a dictionary. In fact, I never saw a dictionary until I started attending a boarding secondary school in 1966. Keep in mind that dictionaries were among the rarest things in our school in those days. They were beyond me and I resolved to get help to understand them. The most troublesome words were crystal, cable, fathom, dwell, pliant, agitation, glide, coral, gothic, glittering, pearl, diadem, exceedingly, account, oysters, deserving, and delicate. After all, ours was a Christian village and everyone knew that. “Hans” was also not difficult since there was a boy in the village who had that same name, but without the “s”.ĭespite being quite long, I found “Christian” easy. The easiest to spell was the word “the” because it was among the most common. See also Barbara Bay - a woman of substance Their appearance is very beautiful, for in each lies a glittering pearl, which would be fit for the diadem of a queen.

The roof is formed of shells that open and close as the water flows over them.

#Insurmountable love in a sentence windows#

Its walls are built of coral, and the long, gothic windows are of the clearest amber. In the deepest spot of all, stands the castle of the Sea King. Fishes, both large and small, glide between the branches, as birds fly among the trees here upon land. No, indeed the most singular flowers and plants grow there the leaves and stems of which are so pliant, that the slightest agitation of the water causes them to stir as if they had life. We must not imagine that there is nothing at the bottom of the sea but bare yellow sand. There dwell the Sea King and his subjects. ‘FAR out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it: many church steeples, piled one upon another, would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above. I also copied with great difficulty the first paragraph and part of the second paragraph as reproduced here: We were not allowed to take any of the books home, so before I went home from school that day, I copied into my notebook the words ‘The Little Mermaid’ and the name Hans Christian Andersen. The next day, I learned from a teacher that a Danish man, Hans Christian Andersen, wrote the book in 1837, and he named its main character ‘The Little Mermaid’. And so, at that moment, I swore to teach myself the language. I wished I could read English well right there and then. The more I flipped through the pages, forward and backwards, the more I wanted to know what the story was about. Unfortunately, I did not know what the book was about because I was unable to read English yet. With the classroom all to myself I took the book and gazed lovingly at the image of the lovely little being on its glossy cover. In the mid-afternoon after school was over on that fateful day, I did not rush home or played football as usual. It was among several other books that our teacher hoped would encourage us to read English. She was on the cover of a book inside a little bookcase that was newly placed in our classroom. Oh, how my little eight-year-old heart adored her. The first time I set eyes on her was in 1961 when I was in Primary 2. In fact, as far as I was concerned no girl was as good-looking as her. To be sure, there were several attractive girls in the village but none was as pretty as her.

She was the prettiest thing ever and I was so obsessed with her. I did not know then that she was 124 years old, but it would not have mattered one bit if I had known. Actually, I thought that legs were irrelevant because where she lived she had no use for them. I just loved her with all my little heart. IT didn’t matter at all that she had no legs.