Ich versuche in Deutsch schreiben...

Meine Deutscheskurse A2 ist gerade fertig! Die naechste Stufe beginnt im Februar. Ich glaube dass, ich meisten einfache Sachen verstehe, aber natuerlich ich muss mehr ueben. Es gibt etwas Worten an den ich kann nie mich erinnere. Und die Regeln und die Praepositionen sind auch (mehr als) ein Bisschen schwer... Aber Deutsch ist immer viel Spass zu lernen. :) Im Dezember und im Januar will ich selbstaendig studieren, um besser im Februar zu sein. Damit ich mehr angenehm mit den Regeln bin, ich moechte jede Woche ein Bisschen in Deutsch schreiben. So! Hier ist meine erste Ubung. Wenn Sie gut Deutsch sprechen, koennen Sie bitte mich korrigieren? Dankeschoen!

Geoff ist weg in den USA, um an einer Messe in Florida teil zu nehmen. Am Sontag fliegt er nach New Jersey um seinen Elterns Haus zu bleiben.  Meine Freundin Gabby ist gerade nach San Francisco zurueckgeflogen. (Wir hatten viel Spass, obwohl ich arbeiten musste.) Fur eine Woche (bis Geoffs zurueckflug nach Berlin) habe ich mehr Zeit zu mehr arbeiten... Und ich hoffe dass, wenn Geoff zurueck kommt, alle Arbeit ist schon fertig!! Naechstes Wochenende sind zwei verschiedenen Christmas-Parties, deshalb ich muss einige Rezepten vorbereiten... Ich will einige Deutsche Brataepfel kochen und zu den Parties mitbringen, und vielleicht ich koche auch etwas Anderen... 

I find that the German teacher I have is really fantastic, because (in my opinion) she's truly a teacher's teacher. I'll just say that three minutes before the class is scheduled to leave for the evening or to stop for a pause, she'd hand out a worksheet and say, "OK! Let's do one last exercise!" instead of letting us off the hook a few minutes early. And she has some really creative activities to get us to talk more in German class, and I think the class is quite dynamic (over the course of the 3 hours each night, twice a week). And sometimes when I take the train home with her, she still makes me speak German to her the entire time, and she corrects me on the train, too. Really a teacher's teacher! I am so happy that she'll be our teacher all the way through the courses (unless I drop out of the rotation at some point because I get too busy). My German still sucks, but it is through no fault of hers. I know that I just need to sit down and get more serious about memorizing and practicing rules, and then I need to find a tandem partner to practice with, in order to get my thinking-while-speaking more up to speed.

Addendum: I find it pretty fun to read back on how my German progress is coming along (however slowly) over time, so I uploaded a sample of my reading of the first paragraph so I can come back and hear myself talking in German at some other point.  Here it is if you're curious! It's a little deceptive because obviously it's easier to read something that's been written than to speak off the cuff. Hopefully at some point I can just talk fluidly without having written it down.

Silver Lining

I am totally emotionally drained this week, because I am dealing with some potential plagiarism issues and it's just really a nasty experience all around. On top of this, everyone needs me in different places for different meetings, and I just discovered that about 1/3 of my Grade 7 class do not know the meaning of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. (As in, given simple, one-step situations, they randomly choose one operation to apply.)

So, I am in need of some silver lining, and that comes from the German class I've started last week (which also sucks up 6 hours a week in class, plus two extra commute hours a week, plus homework that I do in the mornings on the way to work). I really love this class, and the teacher keeps it moving, which is really nice.

I think my feel for grammar is improving within the structured lessons of the class. My vocabulary is also slowly expanding, because our teacher gives us "pop quizzes" from older lessons, which motivates me to keep careful track of new words and to review them on my own time. Her first quiz was hard! Even though I had been reviewing all the new words, I was only able to muster up about half of the answers on the sheet, and that was a lot better than most other students. (The words I managed to translate from English: Remember = erinnern, challenge = Herausforderung, success = Erfolg, and foreign language = Fremdsprache. She didn't have a word box or anything, so you had to just generate the word from scratch, and previously she didn't give us a list to study -- they were just words she randomly picked up from readings from the Ch. 1 of the textbook. So, it was not trivial.) Anyway, silver lining! Here's my introductory piece about my family, which the teacher will collect and correct for me. (We are reviewing grammatical structures for objects, which they call accusatives and datives in German. For everyone else, anyway, it's a review, but for me all the grammar things are new. It's initially a bit confusing, I think more so than direct and indirect objects in French/Spanish. But I hope that it will get better once I grow accustomed to seeing and applying the rules in class.)

Ich habe eine kleine Familie. Meine Schwester lebt in California und meinen Eltern leben in China. Meinen Eltern haben nicht seit drei Jahre gearbeitet. Ich lebe in Berlin mit meinem Freund, wer ist auch aus dem USA. Wir uns heiraten nächste Jahr. Sonst habe ich noch zwei Onkel, zwei Tanten, und drei Cousins in dem USA. Meine Oma noch lebt und sie wohnt mit meinem Onkel. Sie ist 83 Jahre alt und ihr Gesund ist nicht so toll, weil sie nicht gern aus geht. Meine Schwester arbeitet als Chemiker und sie lebt alleine. Sie ist älter als mir aber kleiner und sie sieht jünger. Meine Schwester heißt Flora, und sie liebt Hunden.

My First German Post: Traveling

Ich werde sehr bald weg gehen! Ich bringe mit mir Kleidung und Geld fur einer Monat. Ich bringe auch meiner Kindle, weil ich werde auf dieser Urlaub alleine sein. Ich fliege nach Singapur, dann im Zug fahre ich nach Malaysia, dann nach Thailand und dann endlich nach Vietnam. In Singapur habe ich zwei Freundinnen, und ich werde mit einem bleiben. Ich freue mich schon darauf! Tschuss, und bis bald! xoxo.
 
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Mini-reflection on my progress with my German tutor: I am pretty happy so far with the bits of German I've been managing to pick up, and most recently I was able to converse simply for about 90 minutes straight with my tutor, mostly in German with only bits of English when I got stuck in the middle of a story. I feel that compared with people who have been sitting in a traditional Volkshochschule setting for the same amount of time (in terms of months committed), I am at least on par in my ability to express myself, even though on average I put in less than half of the hours they're putting in, per week. But, the drawback of studying with a private tutor is certainly that it's very adhoc, and less social. My listening isn't as strong as it would be if I were in a group setting, because my German teacher is relatively introverted and I typically have to keep the conversation going on my end. It's great because I get a lot of speaking practice, but my listening (always a weakness anyway, in any language) is lagging behind. My grammar is also weak, because we learn grammar in a pretty adhoc way instead of systematically as we would in a traditional class, so what I can say is based on my natural feel for languages instead of based on learned rules.

I am considering switching it up and enrolling in a Volkshochschule class in the fall, but I am not so sure yet about the 6 hours/week time commitment or the commute. (It'd be a significant step up from 90 minutes/week, at a cafe 3 blocks away from home.) I am still thinking about it, because I don't want to wait too long (ie. another 6 months or a year) and get to a point where my immersed fluency becomes much better than my grammar and I would have to enroll in a class that is really boring for me most of the time, just to fill in all the missed grammatical bits... Eventually, in the long run, I want to finish proper B-level classes and then take on a tandem conversation partner so that I can gain real German fluency, but these goals conflict naturally with the additional responsibilities I wish to take on at work next year. So, I am still thinking about it.

But, I am in a good place. I feel that when you acquire a new language, the first real break-through is when you can start to understand the gist of most conversations-with-strangers directed at you. Because, after that point, you can start picking up more vocabulary and grammar purely by context. That's where I am at, and I find that finally the words on a page are no longer words on a page, but linked to real auditory interactions as well. So, I am in a good place! Happy about getting here by the end of our first year in Germany, even though I cannot remember where we were with our Spanish by the end of the first year.

Life in Germany

I haven't updated much about life in Germany in a little bit, because honestly, I've been mired in work trying to get through the first season of preparing my students for the IBs. (They leave school at the end of April on a week long "study leave" before the exams begin, so I'm certainly not out of the thick of it yet.)

But, little updates about Germany. Nothing big because we haven't traveled much recently, but just little things:

• Did you know that Germans typically get married while they're having the public ceremony at the city hall? As in, instead of that part just being a paperwork thing, the entire family goes down with them to witness that moment when they get married. In fact, the entire wedding is planned around that appointment at the local town hall. Of course, this creates a bit of issues because Germans really like to get married on "easy to remember" dates, such as 4/8/12. (That means, by the way, August 4. European-style dates, as I now prefer. It really makes more sense if you think about it, than mm/dd/yy.) My friend Mandy, for example, had to reserve a place to hold her wedding reception a year in advance, and then only 6 months in advance of her wedding date could she go down to the town hall to make an appointment for her wedding. The line was very long -- there were people who had arrived at 5am to wait (in sub-freezing temp), even though the town hall doesn't open until 9am. She got the last appointment available for 4/8/12, and there were still about 20 people in line behind her who didn't get their appointments made. I asked her what would have happened if she didn't get that appointment, and she said that basically she would have had to try another town hall, and then maybe another. But, this is not good because that means that they would have had to hire a bus to take all of their family members to possibly a far away town to get married, and then to take them back to the wedding reception area. Phewey! And, by the way, most German weddings are very small and only involve family and maybe a couple of very close friends.
  
  
• In terms of German schooling, I've heard from a math teacher that her child is in a public German school, and they start streaming / grouping by levels in as young as 4th grade. By the 4th grade, kids are already carrying planners around with them all day and there are very high expectations of independence.
  
  
• Of course, this is tied to cultural expectations in general. On the streets of Berlin, I often see very young children (maybe 3 or 4 years old) crying while riding/wobbling on their bicycles for the first time down the street. Their parents are typically at least a block ahead of them and not stopping to wait and nurture the kids as you would expect American parents to do. Of course, for months before that (maybe since they're 2 or so??), those same kids have already been running down the street on their little training bikes going as fast as their parents on the big bikes.
  
  Training bikes look like this. The kids glide on them so fast even without pedals, they're practically already riding bikes down the street.
  
  
  But yes, it's definitely tough love. That's why one of my German colleagues could not understand why a 6th-grader's parent did not want us to just leave the kid at a cafe in a train station by himself to wait for his parents to come with his passport before hopping on the train to catch up with everyone else who would have already been on their way. To Germans, 6th-graders should be perfectly capable of doing these things.
  
  
• And if you have been following the German scandal with their former President, Christian Wulff, you might know that many Germans are very happy to see him step down. The President of Germany, different from their Chancellor (Angela Merkel), is more of a figurehead than anything else. They say that he is "kind of like the Queen of England, except he is elected." Because of that, they expect him to be basically perfect. So, even though his scandal involved possible corruption from when he was a governor, he had to step down. Our German friends were following this bit of news closely in hopes that he would.
  
  
• I recently witnessed the German BVG people (sort of "subway and bus police") come around and check tickets on a bus. It was very funny because the bus was very crowded and the stops were too frequent for them to be able to catch people getting off the bus right away when they had gotten on. They ended up jumping off the bus at the first stop, because they thought someone who didn't have a ticket was running away. The whole thing was pretty comical, and I wish they would just stick to checking tickets on the subways, which seems to work pretty well for them. Busses are just too chaotic for doing that kind of thing. ...But, I have to also say that I think people should just buy bus tickets legitimately. We need to support the public transit!! The German transit system is by far the best I've seen!
  
  
• Something for me to investigate is cigarette laws here. Geoff and I met a Marlboro marketing guy when we were in Turkey, and he said that in Germany it's legally allowed to post cigarette ads everywhere. In fact, Marlboro right now has a huuuuge campaign called "(May)Be" that has the word "Maybe" but the first part crossed out. I never understood what it meant until he explained that it means that instead of being a "Maybe" smoker, you should just "Be" a smoker. How terrible that this is allowed!!
  
  This definitely has a negative effect on the young smokers. I regularly see teenagers smoking around schools. I have also seen them at the bus stop rolling their own cigarettes, which is interesting because it looks like something else. I can only imagine that if you roll your own cigarettes, the filter doesn't work very well and you're getting even more carcinogens into your body.
  
  I don't mind when adults smoke (as long as they are not disgusting about it), but I think it is really bad that we let kids, whose bodies are still growing and whose minds are not yet ready to make their own decisions, be exposed so readily to cigarettes. :(
  
  
• On another note, I've been learning German, slowly but surely. I am really glad that I make weekly appointments with my private tutor, because if I didn't, I surely would not feel motivated to be doing stuff every week on top of being incredibly busy at work. But, with her I feel that my reading comprehension is certainly getting better, and my understanding of the German grammatical structure is as well. On top of it, I've now finished the Pimsleur Book 1 audiotapes and have begun Book 2. I am happy because I think I am moving along about as fast as I did when I learned Spanish, and I was certainly comfortably conversational in Spanish by the time I had left El Salvador. Right now I can make broken sentences to say to my German teacher to tell bits and pieces of a story, but sometimes I still lose patience and switch over to English. By the end of the year, I hope to be able to say everything in German!
  

Baby Steps in Learning German

Today, I learned about a funny German category of verbs. (I just started private tutoring last week. It's amazing. I get to move at my own pace, which is pretty miraculous. I really feel that in two classes, I've already covered the equivalent of two or three weeks in a regular course, because I don't have to wait for other people to finish an exercise, and everything is chop-chop fast.)

Anrufen means to call someone up. When you conjugate it, the prefix comes off of the front of the verb and moves to the back. So, for example, to say "Are you going to call (me) on the weekend?" you say, "Rufst du (mich) am Wochenende an?" with the two parts of the verb separated by the entire rest of the sentence! Or, "Are you going to call him about it?" becomes "Rufst du ihn deshalb an?" Totally crazy cool. (By the way, Germans capitalize all nouns, which is funny and cool to me. Everything is important! Morgen, for example, is capitalized when it's a noun meaning "morning", but not capitalized when it is used as an adverb as in "tomorrow"... All sorts of very interesting, very particular grammatical rules!)

I think if I really work at it, I can cover a lot of ground in a calendar year. I am curious what that ground will look like without anyone else to set the pace, so I have decided to motivate myself to do some extra work every week in review of the last lesson and in preparation for the next, in order to maximize this year. It's so exciting! Ich will bald besser sein! (Is that right? "I want to be better soon!")