A Lover's Discourse. Xiaolu Guo

      You raised your eyebrows, not commenting, but almost laughing. Now the waiter appeared. We began to study the menu, which was full of pictures of all sorts of cooked chickpeas.

      ‘German is a hard language, no?’

      ‘Not as hard as Chinese, probably.’ You chuckled. ‘I remember when I first came to Germany from Australia. I was in my late teens. One day I learned a word at school: Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung. I got back home and told my father proudly that I’d learned the longest word I’d ever heard. Then he told me that it was the most useless word to learn.’

      ‘Geschwindig . . .’ I tried to copy this weirdly long word. But I couldn’t. You wrote it down on a napkin:

      Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung

      ‘You don’t need to remember it, if you don’t drive.’

      ‘Do you mind to tell me what it means?’

      ‘Speed limit.’

      Ah. I instantly lost interest.

      ‘Do you want to share some chickpeas?’ you proposed.

      I nodded, tossing the speed limit napkin away.