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

First day of B1.1 and our Lehrerin asked us what our favorite word and line in German was.
For me it was ‘Entschuldigung’ und ‘Ich habe eine Frage’ and continues to be so. Till date, I continue to use it and need it fervently =). Let’s just say I’m pretty sure people are calling me the ‘Habe eine Frage ‘ girl =).

Funny how apprehensive I was about B1.1. I kept hearing how much of a jump it was from A levels and it truly had me worried. Fair to say, the first day was alright for me with me continuing to use my favorite lines ever so ever =). We started off with adjective declination and I realized how much of rules we have in German . One of the most intriguing things about German is how we declinate our adjectives and nouns and also interestingly we can use our adjectives as a Nomen too. So for instance, instead of saying “Die hübsche Frau” in Nominativ you can also just say ‘Die Hübsche’. Interesting, isn’t it? But also a lot to mull over but it’s alright, one step at a time is the saying and that’s how’s I’m going to go about it.

Elza

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