Today is the second last day of B1.1. We all got talking over how fast time flies. I remember moving to Munich and it’s already been 6 months. Starting from A1.1 and wondering what’s happening in class to still wondering it =D but with bouts of clarity, it’s a huge mountain that I’ve been scaling. Now I’m  always looking up advertisements and billboards trying my best to see if I can figure it out and when I do, I do my own little victory dance =D. Let’s say it’s quite the sight. At least it’ll have you laughing and remember people who laugh more, live longer. I’m doing y’all a favor =D.

Moving on from all that musing. Today we happened to look into nachdem. Now nachdem is one of the many temporal conjugations. What they do is they let us know about the beginning, end or rather the length of a particular action. Nachdem helps us to know and understand that two events did not happen at the same time. Rather they happen one after the other where the event in the Hauptsatz happens after the event in the Nebensatz.

Zum beispeil- Nachdem Thomas sich die Zähne geputzt hat, geht er ins Bett.

So here we can see that Thomas went to bed after brushing his teeth and that the two actions happened one after the other. He went to bed AFTER he brushed his teeth. Quite easy peasy, isn’t it =D.

Bis bald.

Elza

I just realized today it’s been 5 months since I’ve moved to Munich. “Herzlich Willkommen” is the first thing I read auf Deutsch in Germany. And I remember the first time I bumped into someone, he said “Entschuldigung” to me. To be fair, I thought he probably must have been muttering “can’t you see woman” in German, but later I realized that’s what you say for “sorry” und “excuse me”. And let’s not forget “tut mir leid”. Although every time I say “tut mir leid”, I feel like I need to do a mini curtsy while I say it! There’s something about it that makes me want to do so .

I later moved onto learning “Können Sie mir helfen” and let me tell you that this particular line has helped me galore. And oh, how could I forget “Ich weiss nicht”. To be fair, I did it pick that up while learning German and I use it a lot in class too. There you go mein liebe Leute, I’ve given you a list of words you should be knowing and using while in München.

Elza

It’s interesting how certain things in German are quite similar to English which I love. I get so excited when I hear a word that’s similar to English because I know that way I won’t end up forgetting it. I guess the key to German is to learn and not to forget which I do all the time. I guess remembering comes with practice and time. So keeping my fingers crossed.

So today we happened to learn about superlatives.  It’s just like English where you say pretty, prettier and the prettiest.  You’re comparing one against the other and the last is the final ground of comparison. For instance if you want to say the friendly man in Positiv (+), Komparativ (++) and Superlative (+++), it is freundlich, freundlicher and am freundlichsten. And if it comes along with an article. It becomes der freundlichste Mann.

It can go a little overboard at times but remember patience is the key .

Elza

If you ask me what I miss the most from back home. It’s the Arabisch food. I grew up on that cuisine and probably that’ll be what I ask for as my last bite when i hit the good o’l old ages of mine. That’s how much this food is a part of me. So when I moved here, a little birdie mentioned it to me how Germany had one of the best durum and kebabs ever tasted.  And I remember scoffing at them saying nothing beats what I’ve had back at home. Well, I moved here and got a taste of this durum right beside our DeutschAkademie and it made me realize that everything doesn’t need to be better than the other. You just need to open your mind to new flavors and new experiences and so I did and I got to taste this amazing explosion of nostalgic and yet new Arabisch cuisine flavors just because I decided to open myself up. The same applies to learning German. It is a difficult ride and often you just don’t want to cross that bumpy road of things your brains still is comprehending but hang on, take a bite and see how much it was worth that effort.

Elza

People often ask me what is the hardest thing when you move places. When I moved down to Munich, I was really apprehensive and it got a little accelerated when I swayed down to the nearest Edeka near my place to search for some all-purpose flour to bake some croissants. And to say I was overwhelmed is an understatement. I still remember walking down the aisles looking for anything remotely resembling flour. And to my surprise I came across a multitude of numbers and I stood there thinking-Whaaaat? I’m pretty sure I was quite a sight to see.

In Dubai, it is quite easy. You just walk into the grocery store, pick up that bag of All purpose flour and take it home and bake away whatever your hear desires.  However when you move to Germany and you go to find that bag of All purpose Flour, I wish you good luck because you’re going to be looking at a lot of numbers.  Now the good news is it’s not just you so you can relax there. I’m pretty sure everyone who moved to Germany thought the same when they went down the aisle to get themselves some All purpose flour =D. For all my newbies into the world of baking, Die Zahlen kennen ist sehr wichtig. So if you’re looking out to bake yourselves some cakes and pastries or a yummylicious pie crust, you need to be looking out for TYPE 405. Now if you’re dreaming about cookies and muffins, TYPE 550 is your go to. And for all my pretzel and chewy texture lovers, TYPE 812 is your boy =D.

It’s funny isn’t it? How different things are around different parts of the world. I guess life is really interesting when you travel =D.

Elza

Irregular verbs and regular verbs. That’s a mouthful but that is what we trying to learn in class today. Irregular verbs or strong verbs as some people call them are different from the regular verbs or ‘weak verbs. However the issue is that for people who are learning German as a new language, find it usually hard to learn these irregular verbs for their stem vowel in the past tense (Präteritum) and perfect tense changes.

For instance take the verb Machen. In its infitinitve form it is mach-en, past tense –mach-te and as a participle perfekt it is ge-mach-t. Notice how the stem mach remains the same and is consistent. This folks is your regular verb in german. Now if you take a look at the verb gehen. In its infinitive form it is gehen, past tense- ging and as a participle perfekt it is gegangen. Notice how here the stem is completely different.  German I’ve come to realize can often be overwhelming at times but you need to remember to breathe in and out, practice a lot and eventually it will come to you. It’s almost like how you don’t think when you speak in your native language, you don’t think about the tenses of verbs and nouns individually and then put it together. It all just comes together without thinking. With practice I believe, that is the key to cracking this Fremdsprachen.

Elza

One of the most frequently used lines in German classes are ‘Wer bist du’? und ‘Woher kommst du?’. And I use it religiously because it allows me to know a little about the person and get to know about their countries and the lifestyle. Moving to Germany has truly opened my eyes and ears to so many new notions. And not to forget, learning a new language is also doing the same for me. I’m still pretty bad at German but nothing beats that sense of accomplishment when the other person, usually a poor German fellow who has to listen to my German, understands what I’m saying. If I could get away with doing the salsa in front of people, I’d be doing that to celebrate =D.

I love the questions that follow up once someone asks me ‘Woher Kommen Sie’ and I reply ‘Ich komme aus Dubai’. I absolutely enjoy the follow up questions especially regarding the heat =D. So for those of you who don’t know, Dubai is a desert but you wouldn’t believe me if you saw it. That is how they’ve changed one of the world’s most popular countries to visit. Now the temperature there hits usually around 48 °C and it’s amazing to see everyone shudder at the thought of the temperature ever rising that high here. Back home in Dubai, Die Klimaanlage is considered quite a normal commodity in every household and I still remember being surprised when I moved here that most of the houses here have no ventilator or Klimaanlage. It’s fair to say Winter is my most favorite season here in Munich so while everyone else is burying themselves under layers of clothes during winter, I just love stepping out and enjoying the cold wind hit my face.  Funny how we all bring back a little of home with us. For me it’s waiting for winter to start and for here in Munich, I’m pretty sure everyone awaits the Summer. Food for thought, isn’t it =D?

Elza

My mom’s favorite word is ‘Nonetheless’. Well, today is my lucky day because I’m going to be telling her that back and that too in German. Today in our German class we discussed about Verbindungsadverbien (conjunctive adverbs) and over how they create logical relationships between clauses in a sentence. So, we have ‘obwohl’ and ‘trotzdem’ and they each serve a different purpose. ‘Obwohl’ stands for although in german and it connects a Haupsatz with a Nebensatz and it talks about unerwartete Gegensatze (contrast situations).

Zum Beispiel- Ich gehe nicht zum Arzt, obwohl ich erkältet bin.

Now if you look up the word ‘Trotzdem’, you’ll get all a lot of synonyms like however, still, yet, though and more. I personally think ‘despite that’ is the closest to what the word really means.

Zum Beispiel- Er verdient wenig. Trotzdem fahrt er ein teures Auto.

A couple of things to look out for while using Trotzdem is to remember that this word connects  Hauptsatz with another Hauptsatz and that it has position in a sentence so it is always followed by a verb. I personally think these are words I’ll be using for sure a lot in my daily broken attempts at speaking this complicated and yet dear to me language =)

Elza

Finding an apartment in Germany is the toughest. It’s like searching for a unicorn. You want it to desperately exist so you keep searching away =D. Today my vocabulary has grown by a little because we were learning about the most commonly used words you see in the Anzeige for an Apartment. We also peeked into the ‘Abkürzungen’ of these words too. So if we’re looking at Zimmer, the abkürzungen is ‘Zi’, or we’re looking out for shared apartments, the word you need to be looking out for is ‘Wohngemeinschaft(Whg.). I’ve noticed how much of a mountain German is but as you keep climbing, you start getting closer to the peak. Im going to be going out and using my new found vocabulary to help me find by unicorn Apartment =D.

Another interesting thing we looked into is relativepronomen and Relativsatz im Dativ. So if we were to say “This is the man I helped”. It is „Das ist der Mann, dem ich geholfen habe“. Here dem represents the Man and in dative the article for masculine is dem so since we are continuing to talk about him in dative, Der Mann becomes Dem and the verb goes to the end of the sentence as it is a relativsatz. That’s a lot of things to be looking out for but trust me, it does get better =D.

Elza

Today reminded me of how different German is from my native language. In English we only have one definite article and indefinite article ‘THE’ and ‘A’ and they don’t change according to the gender of the nouns. To start, we don’t even have gender for objects. For instance, in German its ‘Die Lampe’ and we use the bestimmter Artikel ‘Die’ because Lampe is feminine but in English it would just be ‘The lamp’. So it was a lot to be working with when I started learning German but now I’ve noticed how weird it feels to mess up the gender and article of inanimate objects =D. I’m hoping that’s a sign that my German is improving =)

Thankfully, our Lehrerin has also given us pointers and extra notes to help us pull through it.
The most frustrating part of learning a language is sometimes not knowing how to put across what’s in your mind. And once I’ve figured it out, I keep forgetting I need to declinate by adjectives and Nomen =). But I do have a tiny hope that maybe, just maybe, someday I might be able to speak German without having to think so much. Maybe it’ll come from the heart like it does for every native speaker of German. Till then, I´m going to be working with my tiny notes that I always carry around =D

Elza