The Grammatik is killing me. I was never a big fan of English classes in school so therefore how am I supposed to remember verb conjugation or 1st/2nd verb position? All of that I was taught was just...just what it was! To figure out now (in Deutsch) if a verb is conjugated with "he/she/it/they/you (Informal or Formal)/I/your" type is so very confusing. I've learned the infinitive and the tense, but not sure how to tell the difference of present, past and future tenses! I was so confused yesterday I had to ask my Romanian classmate (who is an English teacher) what the heck a verb was; I was totally drawing a blank! I can understand when reading, but when I'm asked to form the sentence I pause. I can understand all of the words in the sentence but when putting them together it confuses me because it's backwards from English!
I have 2 different teachers, Sandra the 1st part of the week and Lydia the 2nd part of the week. I definitely LEARN from teacher #1 but not so much with teacher #2. I'm not alone; half the people in class feel the same. I don't know if this is a good thing or bad thing - I should be exposed to different learning styles so that I don't become comfortable with one person's style. BUT I just feel so much better the first part of the week when I can figure out what I'm being asked in class!
I just needed to vent this out. As soon as I woke up this am the Deutsch started flowing into my brain. Wo bist du? Ich komme aus... Mein name ist... die, der, das...mein, kein, meine, keine. Is it masculine or feminine or neutral...oh geez. And from what I've read in "learning a foreign language is frustrating" articles, it is good for me to practice these things and it's totally normal for me to be feeling this way. The class is great, fun actually. The best part is that it is a total melting pot. My classmates are from Romania, Russia, Iran, Brazil, Spain, Venezuela, Uruguay, and 1 more from the USA. Some don't speak English so it's really fun to try to converse with each of them when someone else across the room can translate, it's actually quite comical. If anything we are working on our team work skills, trying to work together to figure out what the heck is going on half the time!
Over the past almost 5 months I think I've done pretty good getting by and self-teaching myself the important things that I need to understand while out and about. I think the main thing that I've learned living in Deutschland is that I just have to go with the flow and not worry too much when I can't understand anything or everything that a native speaker tells me. Living here is a unique and extremely worthwhile experience on so many levels and of course there are going to be daily frustrations when I can't even understand the simple question of what my name is! At the same time, it is a great feeling to chat with someone at the bus stop or in the store and have a complete understanding of the conversation with a German.
Only 14 days of class to go, 6 down. It's not much but it has been intensive and I'm sure will continue to be! Hopefully I understand and do well enough in this course so that I can move to the next level!
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