Almost two years ago, my friends Thomas and Ulli gave me a crossword puzzle book while I was in rehab recovering from a traumatic brain injury. I have been working on that book a little bit at a time since then. For quite some time, I mostly worked on it in waiting rooms for doctors, which has been a fairly frequent occurrence in the past two years. Lately I started working on it more at home as well, particularly in the evening before bed, as a way to relax. The book has all the solutions at the end, and I almost always end up looking at the solution at some point while I am doing it. I commented to my wife recently that if I ever can solve one all by myself, it will be a “red letter day”. Well, that day happened on July 2nd. As it turns out, the puzzle was one with several letters pre-filled (in red). Quite a coincidence. One could claim that since some of the letters are pre-filled, that I did not do it all on my own. I am going to count it though. Even though I studied German and have been living in Germany for seven years, my German vocabulary is still not nearly as large as my English vocabulary, so it is a great mental challenge. I used to do English crossword puzzles frequently when I was younger (in the newspaper). There are a certain set of “crossword puzzle words” which come up frequently – words which are otherwise not that common. For example, an aria is a solo in an opera. It makes a great word for crossword puzzles because it is short and has 75% vowels, which makes it easy to fit into other words. I knew this word from English crossword puzzles, but it turns out it is also used in German crossword puzzles as well, though spelled with an e, Arie, for some reason. It is actually Italian, so I don’t know why they change the spelling in German.
I finished the book a couple days ago. I actually bought a new one already, but haven’t started it. So far, still just the one puzzle finished without peeking at the solution. I hope there will be more. I have been wondering if I should do some systematic studying outside of doing puzzles to help me solve them. In particular, there are some general categories of clues which I mostly just don’t know, such as
- European river names (including which rivers they flow into, since the clues often reference that)
- Bird names
- Flower and tree species
One category which I was surprised that comes up often in German crossword puzzles is the names of states in the United States of America. Those I know very well.