Today we played a game, where the teacher says a body part in German and we have to quickly point it out. We were divided into two teams and had to compete with each other. It was a lot of fun because it was a good revision for what we have learnt in A2.1. Although I knew the vocabularies, but it was hard for me to react to them quickly. The main reason is because I learnt them by heart, but never used them. Also during the game, I learnt a lot of other body parts which were not in the text book such as “Wimper” etc. I think these little games are really useful to revise the vocabularies. It is also a nice break between 3 hours of classes.

DeutschAkademie is located in the center of the city-Karlsplatz, there are a lot of shopping and eating places which you can enjoy before the class. For example, there are fast food, kebab and a number of take away places where you can grab some food before the class. Also since all the shops close at 8pm, as a person who works and attends DeutschAkademie, there are no time for grocery shopping. Thus the only time would be 30-45mins before the lesson starts. Shopping places such as Galeria near DeutschAkademie helped me a lot with organizing my time. I always go there for food shopping such as milk, vegetables and bread etc. Since time is limited, it is very important to make use of every single minutes.

Today we have a different teacher in class, at the begining, girls are guessing who will be our teacher and how he/she will be. But it turns out we are pretty lucky to have another good teacher. Ms Celeste is also a nice and patient lady who always smiling and be happy to answer our questions in class. We reviewed our lessons last week and corrected our homework, but actually today’s the speech day for new president in America and all of us are quite curious about his speech and the news. Instead of telling us not to do this, Ms Celeste started to discuss with us too and tried to let us learning German expressions at discussion. I think it’s a very good way to distract students of their phone and try to learn language out of daily life. Knowledge is not only can be learned in books, I was impressed the teaching way here, learning is not repeating what we have in book, it is flexible and make us learn by heart.

During the classes, we also play some games to help us with memorizing new vocabularies. For example, today we played hangman game and it was a lot of fun. Hangman is a paper and pencil guessing game for two players. One player thinks of a word and the other tries to guess it by suggesting letters, within a certain number of guesses. We played this game with the partner who doesn’t speak the same native language, so we had to practice our German. This game really helped me to learn new vocabularies and it was a good way to relax and have some fun after a long day. I am looking forward to play it again next time.

Since relaxing is as important as studying, I visited a town in Bavaria called Landshut last week. It is a town in Bavaria in the south-east of Germany, belonging to both Eastern and Southern Bavaria. The town is popularly known for the Landshuter Hochzeit (Landshut Wedding), a full-tilt medieval festival. It is a small town with a lot of historical architectures. You can really feel that you are out of the busy city. Thus it is really good for weekend trip, just to relax and escape from the city.There is also a small city center and the cafes and restaurants are really pretty and cozy. I really recommend everyone to visit.

Yesterday we had a test to check our own progress and how much we learnt during this course. During the last weeks, we covered a lot of grammars, vocabularies and conversational phrases. Our teacher gave us a lot of handouts and exercises to practice the grammar and I think they were extremely helpful. So that we always had time to digest the new knowledge and actually put them into practice. I think it was a really good idea to have a test after two weeks because I was able to see my strengths and weaknesses. Also it made me to revise all the lessons and new vocabularies. After the test, I realized how much progress I made in the past two weeks and I was really proud of myself.

My name is Mirei and I’m currently taking A1.2 Intensive Evening Course in Deutsch Akademie.I am originally from Japan and I moved to Munich a few months ago. I was looking for a German course which I can attend after work, and it was a hard decision because there are a number of language schools in Munich. After all, I chose to attend Deutsch Akademie, not only because of my colleague’s recommendation, but also due to many other factors. Firstly, location played a very important role. Since it is located in Karlsplatz, it was convenient to reach by public transport. Also because it is in the city center, it is easy to grab food before the classes. In addition, I was looking for intensive evening course and only Deutsch Akademie offered the course that lasts one month. Most of all, the price was reasonable and the size of the group was really important for me. In Deutsch Akademie, the groups are small (max 11 people) and this allows students to practice speaking more. I think Deutsch Akademie was a good decision and I’m really looking forward to the course.