This past month was the season of the world cup 2018. As a semi-football-fan, I have watched almost all the live games online. I can still remember the day the German national team lost to South Korea and at the same time lost the chance to go further.

In Munich, bars, cafés, beer gardens and restaurants, are full of people gathering and cheering for Germany. Streets and public transportation are less crowded and much quieter. I have also heard that schools and companies let people get home earlier than usual so that they can watch the game on time. However, the result was disappointing. I felt the frustration in my neighborhood when people downstairs were hitting the floor and shouting when the game ended. Ironically in the German language course we were still discussing the story of Germany winning the championship in 2014.

I have always known that there are many football fans in Munich because it is where FC Bayern locates. But it is the first time that I feel their passion and love for football and their national team. Let’s hope the team will grow stronger and have greater performance in the coming UEFA European Championship in 2020.

Yang

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

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

Am Samstag habe ich das Planetarium der ESO (auf Englisch, European Southern Observatory) Supernova in Garching besucht und da eine Show, die „Verborgenes Universum“ heißt, gesehen. Es war ein wunderschönes Erlebnis, weil ich von der Show und der Ausstellung sehr beeindruckt war.

Als ich ein Kind war, hatte ich große Interesse an den Sternen, die in der Nacht wie Augen blinkten. Aber niemals habe ich die Milchstraße gesehen, denn ich bin immer in der Stadt geblieben. Heute wurde der Traum wahr! In dem Planetarium habe ich nicht nur die Milchstraße und Planeten im Universum, sondern auch die vielen ESO-Teleskope über meinem Kopf geschaut und erkundet. Dadurch, dass der Film das Studium und Leben der Wissenschaftler(innen) zeigt, akzeptiert man Astronomie einfacher. Es gefällt mir auch sehr, wie die Ausstellungen organisiert sind. Das Gebäude vom Besucherzentrum sieht eine Spriale aus und alle Informationen werden nach einigen Themen oder Fragen präsentiert, z.B. wie ein Stern aufgebaut ist.

„Nova“ ist auf Latein „neu“, aber kennst du, dass die Supernova nicht die Geburt eines neuen Sterns, sondern der Tod eines massereichen Sterns ist, wenn er explodiert? Man kann so viele interessante Geschichte lernen von dem Besuch. Die Kinder sind begeistert und die Jugend hat eine gute Chance, um Astronomie kennenzulernen. Erwachsene freuen sich auch über die Neugier der Kindheit. Ich habe schon mehr Shows reserviert und ich kann es nicht erwarten es wieder zu sehen!

Yang

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

Hallo Leute,

ich heiße Yang, komme aus China und jetzt bin ich Studentin vom C1 Kurs der DeutschAkademie. Seit einem Jahr bin ich in München und seit dem A1.1 Kurs habe ich in DeutschAkademie studiert! Wie die Zeit fliegt…

Als eure Bloggerin möchte ich heute etwas über meine erste Woche schreiben. Ohne Überraschung ist der C1 Kurs viel intensiver als B2. Im Kurs gibt es verschiedenen Übungen, damit wir noch ein mal die Grammatik wiederholen. Die Themen des Buchs sind tiefer als früher. Das heißt, wir versuchen, nicht nur um etwas zu beschreiben, sondern auch über abstrakte Gedanken zu diskurtieren. Für mich persönlich was besonders schwierig ist, dass ich meine Idee zum Ausdruck mit den richtigen Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen bringe. Deshalb habe ich einen Zeitplan gemacht, dadurch ich schnell die wichtige Wörter merken kann. Mein Wunsch für den Kurs ist, dass ich mein Deutsch verbessere und selbstbewusster bin wenn ich spreche.

Yang

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

So my last talk with all of you. I was thinking of sharing a bit about myself and my experience here so far.

I came to Germany just 6 months back to join my husband who has been here for 8 years now. I was working for an international call Center in Lahore Pakistan where I was the “Head of Training Department”.

Pakistan is an amazing yet very misunderstood country. A lot of people ask me if life in Pakistan was different from what it is here and I always tell them that I had a similar if not better life style there. I had a successful career, a loving family, independence, fun, and lots of friends.

Before coming to Munich, I had already been to 4 continents.
However, 2 things that I was trying to achieve for a long time only finally happened after I came to Germany.

1. Losing weight
2. Learning a new language

I am enrolled in B1.1 and am planning to do one more course before starting serious job hunt.

Best of luck to you all and may be one day when I get rich and famous, you’ll be able to see my interview on TV and will recall the days when I was just your blog friend.

Jaweriya

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