After a one hour walk around town to get my bearings - find a cash machine and get some groceries - I went to school (Kästner Kolleg)with anxiety and trepidation. I have no real reason for wanting to learn how to speak German, only that I picked up a bit of it when touring with Riverdance and I am trying to do something new in each year of my thirties. (Diving was the new adventure for 2008). I guess I will do TWO new things this year because not only am I going to a German language school, I am going to be on time every day. I was late for school so many times in elementary, secondary and post-secondary school that there were late slips already waiting for me when I showed up to each office.
I signed up for the intensive course here at the Kolleg which is 30 hours per week over five days - ten hours more than the standard course. I thought it made more sense to get in as much learning as I could. I had claimed to be a Level 2 student thinking that Level 1 consisted of the alphabet, colours, numbers, basic greetings (all things I learned on The Rosetta Stone). Boy was I wrong. My class (six students plus one teacher) has been studying for eleven weeks and are conversing in German rather well. They are in the second half of level 2 and it was determined that I belong between the 1st and 2nd halves of level 1. The first half hour of today's class consisted of having each student give details about their weekend (no English allowed) followed by a test on last week's studies. Um, yeah, that's fair. I didn't just get my feet wet today - I took a whole shower (both literally and figuratively actually).
I have learned many German words over the past six months but I lack the experience to string them together to form a sentence. I don't yet understand the concept of forming the German sentence (there are many inconsistent rules to German grammar, although I concede that mastering the English language is not without chaos). Right now, I think I could have equal luck to write all of the words of any given sentence on a various dice and roll them out like in a game of Yahtzee since the nouns and verbs etc. go in a different order than in English.
Tomorrow, I will join the lower level's lessons in the morning and continue with the intermediate lessons in the afternoon. The extra ten hours per week I signed up for is actually all conversational and the teacher and I both decided that it will be way too advanced for me.
Sooooooooo, I shall use that time to study and to blog.
I signed up for the intensive course here at the Kolleg which is 30 hours per week over five days - ten hours more than the standard course. I thought it made more sense to get in as much learning as I could. I had claimed to be a Level 2 student thinking that Level 1 consisted of the alphabet, colours, numbers, basic greetings (all things I learned on The Rosetta Stone). Boy was I wrong. My class (six students plus one teacher) has been studying for eleven weeks and are conversing in German rather well. They are in the second half of level 2 and it was determined that I belong between the 1st and 2nd halves of level 1. The first half hour of today's class consisted of having each student give details about their weekend (no English allowed) followed by a test on last week's studies. Um, yeah, that's fair. I didn't just get my feet wet today - I took a whole shower (both literally and figuratively actually).
I have learned many German words over the past six months but I lack the experience to string them together to form a sentence. I don't yet understand the concept of forming the German sentence (there are many inconsistent rules to German grammar, although I concede that mastering the English language is not without chaos). Right now, I think I could have equal luck to write all of the words of any given sentence on a various dice and roll them out like in a game of Yahtzee since the nouns and verbs etc. go in a different order than in English.
Tomorrow, I will join the lower level's lessons in the morning and continue with the intermediate lessons in the afternoon. The extra ten hours per week I signed up for is actually all conversational and the teacher and I both decided that it will be way too advanced for me.
Sooooooooo, I shall use that time to study and to blog.
