What builds you as a person in life are your experiences and this German class has opened a new paradigm in my life. I don’t know how these 2 months flew by. I had the wonderful opportunity to interact with so many interesting international people and make some new friends.

All the people came from very different works of life but the reason for learning German for the most of the people seemed to be the same, to have better job opportunities.
This was my reason as well.
I have to keep going till C1 for my German to descent enough for it to be useful for my job. I am glad we had Christine as our teacher and our substitute teachers were equally good. Shout out to DeutschAkademie for having such a great organization full of lovely people who are always willing to help and running things like a well-oiled machine.
I also thank DeutschAkademie for giving me this opportunity to write this blog. In our last class we discussed the answers for the exam that was held a day before. Of course, our class ended with a customary potluck where we enjoyed some of the delicious food.

Auf Wiedersehen!

Sudeep

We had a test today to recapitulate what we had learned so far. It included a lot of the grammar that we learned in A1. The first question was about using sein or ihr based on the subject being male or female and also if it was nominative or akkusative.

The next question was with prepositions for dativ with den/der/den definite forms or with einem/einer indefinite forms. The questions were also testing if we remembered the gender of the subject.

Questions with personal pronouns with dativ such as mir/dir/ihm/ihr/uns/euch/ihnen or with akkusative such as mich/dich/ihn/es/sie/uns/euch/sie and recognizing whether to use the singular or plural forms. Filling out some sentences with the normal/comparative/superlative form of the verbs.

Then we had to organize sentences by using the correct forms of the verbs based on whether it was a staement with verb in the 2^nd position or a question with Wann/Warum. Also, we had to arrange sentences with denn and weil in the middle of a sentence as well as the ones starting with Weil which was the last topic we learned.

All in all, this was a nice overview test which all round questions. There are plenty of other exercises in the book as well for further practice.

Sudeep

Like the saying goes “Second place is the first loser”. Well if you going to say that in German you will have to know the words. They go like erste, zweite, dritte etc as you can see in the picture. This is also used in referring to dates like 25^th of July would be fünfundzwanzigsten Juli. So in a sentence you use is as

Mein Geburtstag ist am achtundzwanzigsten Januar.

So that was fairly straight forward. We started discussing how kids express love for their parents. In German you say

Ich habe dich lieb
Or
Ich mag dich (in bavaria)

to your parents or anyone else and

Ich liebe dich

only to your boyfriend/girlfriend. So, there is quite a difference in those two and you don’t want to be assuming wrong things when someone says something along those lines to you 😉

Sudeep

After learning comparative and superlative forms of adjectives last week we started learning how to construct sentences with it. Basically, if the two things under comparison are not similar you have to use “als” like

Ich bin größer als du.

And when they are similar you have to use “so” or “genauso” with the adjective and add a preposition “wie” like

Ich esse Pizza genauso gern wie Pasta.

Simple enough right? Only difficultly was figuring out under which category of the adjective classes would it fall for deciding the comparative additive.

Our next story article went over a nice scene with a Wohnmobil next to a See. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just transport ourselves inside the picture? Right now, in Munich it is pretty warm so staying in the water is the best way to relax. Although I don’t think everyone can swim in the Isar since it is a bit cold. I was at the Germering See this weekend where the water temperature was perfect.

Was hast du am Wochenende gemacht?

Sudeep

One more week in the bag and the last one to go, woohoo! In a way I can’t wait for the classes to finish so I can have some break from German and can revise all the material we covered. Also, there are tons of unfinished exercises in the kursbuch and arbeitsbuch which I could finish.

We did sentences with “dürfen” in which the rules are stated. For addressing people, its preferred to use “man” instead of “Leute” or “Menschen”. So, a typical sentence for saying you should not walk in the bicycle lane would be

„Man darf nicht auf dem Fahrradweg gehen.“

Or to say people shouldn’t smoke in a restaurant it should be

„Man darf nicht im Restaurant rauchen.“

We also did normal, comparative and superlative adjectives. The superlative is easy since you only have to add “-sten” at the end of the adjective. It’s a little more complicated for the comparative since you have to see what the word ends with. Adjectives ending with “el” get “ler” at the end like dunkler and the ones ending with “er” replaces the “er” with “rer” like teurer. Monosyllabic adjectives get “er” at the end and also an Umlaut like größer. Ich wünsche euch ein schönes Wochenende.

Sudeep

We went over the signs for the Regeln in Germany and how to say what is allowed vs what we mustn’t do. The key difference between English and German here is that with “muss nicht” you are saying you don’t have to but you can do it. So, if you want to say what you really shouldn’t be doing in by “darf nicht” which means not allowed to by law or whatever. This is more stricter way of saying it which is generally the normal way to express a “schild” for a “regeln”.

We also played a team game today where we had to bet 1000 imaginary euros into guessing which of the 10 sentences were grammatically correct. There were 5 sentences wrong among the 10 but somehow when we first read it, 9 out of 10 seemed incorrect 😊 Well after further consultation we tried to agree on what other sentences could be correct and maybe we are mistaken in remembering some of the grammar rules. Mind you that we couldn’t use the books or the phone so it was quite a challenge. After the correct answers came out, the winners got their kinder chocolate prize which we took from them outside the class haha

Sudeep

Haben and sein are a bit clearer now. It’s just easier to think about it in English and not worry about the German grammar rules 😊 Thanks to a classmate for the tip!

We learned Imperativ sentences (commands) with ihr and du. For du you only use the stem verb as the first word and for ihr you use the stem verb with a -t at the end like

Schlaf nicht so lange! (for du)
Schlaft nicht so lange! (for ihr)

This brought us to the household chores which everyone has to perform. From taking the garbage out to wiping the floor, you know the stuff which no one likes doing! What grinds my gear most though is when I have to use a vacuum cleaner which was not designed properly (Miss my Hoover windtunnel!). You go over this same piece of dirt 5 times and its still there. Might as well pick it up with your own hands at that point.

The class ended with a quick game of memorizing some of these household chores in 2 min and writing down as many as you can remember out of the 14 listed in the book. I could only remember 6 but got 4.5 due to spelling mistakes. Two of our classmates got 8 points which was the highest score as you can see in the picture!

Sudeep

After a relaxed weekend in Thuringia came back home last night to an over flowing kitchen drainage pipe. What a huge mess to clean up and freaking out over further overflows. Trying to talk to neighbors to not use the kitchen sink in the little German I know was a challenge. I used the google translated sentences but seems like they couldn’t understand much :/

Did the homework in a rush this morning and of course made a lot of mistakes! We converted the homework sentences in the present tense to perfect form on the fly and boy talk about a hodgepodge in the brain. For the first 30 min in the class felt like I forgot everything but our teacher was nice enough to slow down a bit and go over some of the very basic rules all over again. Hey repetition helps alright! That’s the only way stuff goes from short term memory to long term memory. I have keep remembering that for perfect forms haben is always with direct object and sein is with verbs of motion, verbs describing change of state and then there are a few special cases to remember. Practice, practice practice!!!

Sudeep

We are learning Deutsch but this does not mean that we will be able to understand what people say in all parts of Germany. According to wiki, Germany has 35 different dialects! That’s a lot of dialects considering the size of Germany.

We had a lot of trouble describing how our classmates live their life as you can see from all the scribbles in the kursbuch. For examples when asked “Isst du jeden Tag Obst?” the answer should be “Sie isst jeden Tag Obst”. The switch between jeden Tag and Obst is correct (for some reason). But this is not the case when asked “Wie oft machst du Sport”. The answer describing your classmate should be “Sie macht Sport jede Woche”. So now it is in the back :O

With the “noch nie” we had a more consistent form such as
“Sie ist noch nie in die Sauna gegangen.” and “Sie hat noch nie Kaffee getrunken.“

This was surprising that in our class very few people drank Kaffee but it was good that most people lebst gesund. I think that’s a very classic feature of big cities that most people tend to live a more healthy life except for when it comes to drinking haha

Sudeep

In my last blog post, I praised about the German engineering. But one place it could really improve is the S Bahn. I feel like there are problems with this train everyday and coming from the class sometimes takes 4 times longer than usual!

We learned the names of all the body parts. Except for arm, hand, finger, knie and nase all are different words. Well Fuß should also be easy to remember from Fußball. These words were used in a conversation between a couple and a nun where the husband was sick. This led to the discussion of talking in direct and indirect. Direct conversation as the name suggests is when 1 person is directly talking to another. The verb is in the first place if the sentence ends with an exclamation similar to as when a question would be. During indirect conversation, 2 people talk about a third person and soll (should) takes the second spot and the verb takes the last spot in the sentence.

We also went over the different forms of pronouns when using mit and ohne in Dativ and Akkusativ in their respective gender. There is quite a few different forms of these to learn here and examples to go over.

Sudeep