In daily life, there is always these instances when you have to make an excuse for either being late or to not show up at all. Some maybe predetermined and some maybe actually true. Whatever the case conveying them in German is important. Don’t let the scary word Entschuldigung scare you, you will get used to it. Also, you could say tut mir leid (I am sorry) but I have heard it less in public.

We learned a lot of new vocabulary apart from the ones which are highlighted on top of the page in the kursbuch. The ones highlighted were regular household stuff like Licht (light), Handtuch (handtowel), Föhn (hairdryer) etc. Especially in the text which in is each chapter there are tons of new words describing a scenario. One of the scenarios we went through was when 2 people got stuck in the elevator and the conversation that followed. Can’t believe an elevator can malfunction since German engineering can never fail so how can this ever happen!

Sudeep

It is getting a little clearer with the distinction between dativ and akkusativ. The dativ part of a sentence is basically the action which is not performed right now. Akkusative is more like the action you are directly referring to.

The questions like “with whom?” and “with which person?” are referred to as “mit wem?” and “mit welcher Person?”. Remembering to whom the sentence is referring to helps identify the nominative and hence figure out which his/her form can be used to replace it. For example,

Die Nachbarin von Herr Rahn, wohnt uber Herr Rahn.

Where the underlined nominative could be replaced by Seine Nachbarin.

A confusing word we learned is “absagen” which is a “trennbares verb” and used in a sentence like “Ich sage ab” (I cancel) which is similar to “Ich sage” but then it means “I say”!!The “ab” changes the meaning of the word completely so when you listen to a sentence you have to hear the whole sentence before jumping onto a conclusion. When you are reading its fine go back and look the previous words and find a fit but when you are listening I think this could be challenging.

Sudeep

I feel like throwing a party when all the grammar rules come to and ends! Regardless of the rules we are having a lot of fun in the class. We played a game where everyone writes “Ich Lieblingsstadt…, Ich Lieblingsrestaurant…” etc on a sheet of paper. The paper then gets mixed up and not given back to us, so we ended up with someone else’s sheet. We have to read the sheet as “Ihre Lieblingsstadt…” and guess who wrote it. We ended up knowing some new restaurants in Munich from this exercise :)

We learned the Dativ forms of personal pronomens and it was a little complicated. Each one of the nominativ forms has a distinct Dativ form and some are words!! Also, the words are eerily close in pronunciation, so it is equally confusing. I have to find a pneumonic to somehow remember this. Well I have the whole weekend to figure this out.

We kind of finished all the parts of speech (I think) but the distinction between Dativ and Akkusativ is not very clear to me but we will go over this in detail with examples next week. I will try to look at some examples during the weekend to get a better feel for it. Enjoy the weekend!

This is a “sein” that I am learning German. His aka sein and her aka ihr have their nominativ and akkusativ forms and each again have their corresponding forms for masculine, feminine and neutral. At least the plural for his and her is always seine and doesn’t change with gender. Phew! Also, for singular, the nominativ and akkusativ forms are the same for both feminine and neutral making it a little easier.

Building German vocabulary along the way is also critical along with learning the grammar. But I don’t know how many times I had to look up the same word, it’s embarrassing! The real test comes when you hear the audio in the course and the sentences fly by and every time you recognize one word it’s like a firework in your brain. In that ecstasy you miss half of the next sentence. I wish the CD recordings were a little slower at least for the A1 students can absorb a little more. But anyways, we go over the new words the audio in our course book.

The fun began when we had to draw our classmate’s description of their house. I don’t remember how many years it has been since I drew eine Blume, ein Haus, ein Baum, ein Auto… 😊 😊 😊

Sudeep

We dived into Dativ today and it is not as scary as I thought it would be. Also, we learned about the locator words like vor, neben, hinter and über. No, it’s not the same as calling a uber. Über means over which is somewhat similar to English (with a thick British accent).
For the getting the article right you have to know the gender of the object. Seems like it all comes down to remembering if the object is a masculine, feminine or neutral. Since there is no trick to remembering this. You have to memorize for all the words in the German dictionary. Even synonyms can have different gender so the gender is really based on the word rather than the object itself.
I think this is the biggest problem everyone finds in German but it’s not the only language which has this. Some of the other languages I know like Hindi and Bengali also have a gender associated to the object. But I don’t remember memorizing the gender there when I was learning those languages and it just came to the students with time and practice. So, I am not stressing out about gender right now.

Sudeep

Wow we finished A1.1 and started A1.2. So unreal!
A little about myself, your blogger for the month. 😊
I moved to Munich from NY with my partner with no German knowledge. After a couple of months of job search, I figured out that without German it’s hard to find a job in Germany. After a quick google search of the available schools teaching German in Munich we found out about DeutschAkademie.

The first month with our fabulous teacher went so fast! We had students from India, South Korea, China, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Poland and Russia and had a wide range of ages from 20’s to the 60’s. So don’t let your age or ethnicity stop you from taking the course. The classes are all in German but our teacher was multilingual. Our A1.1 class ended with an amazing snack break with our wonderful classmates. Comment below if you want to know what each item is!

A1.1 course finished last week and for the first time in a while we did not have any homework. A break which I could have utilized a little better studying German but I was busy applying for jobs and enjoying Tollwood summer festival. We left A1.1 by going over different forms of a verb in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular and plural. We also learned about regular and irregular and trennbare verbs. We also did nominative and akkusative forms in a sentence. We ended by going over sentences in Perfekt form (Present Perfect). Now I just have to transfer it to my brain, easy huh!

Sudeep