Come with me if you want to live: Ein bisschen Deutsch

Hi folks. Hope life is treating you well. Wanted to make a quick post about the German intensive course. This week we have been traveling and next week I will have a few posts about the adventures we’ve had. On Tuesday we finished our German intensive course that we started at the beginning of February. On the last day we had our final exams in written and spoken German. We have not got the results back yet, but I believe at least that we passed. Two weeks ago we had our midterm exam and I got a 1 as a grade. That is the best grade you can get. It is little weird that here they grade from 1-4 or from 1-5 where 1 is the best. So totally opposite from what I am used to. In the midterm test I got 93 points from 100, unfortunately Anne got 94 and along with that the bragging rights.

German feels hard as a language. The course was really educational and I am happy with what I have learned, but still I really don’t understand anything when people talk German to me. Only thing I feel confident in is reading and it’s good that we get to read something every day here, so we don’t forget. I have tried speaking a little German, but the biggest problem is when someone replies in German, they need to talk so slow and it takes forever for my brain to process the information. Hopefully it gets better in time and I hope some of it sticks in my brain after we leave.

One thing I found amusing and at the same time extremely frustrating about German is how every word has a “gender”. The word can be masculine and have “der” article in front or “die” for female and “das” for neutral. I think this is bananas, but as a Finn who am I to talk about weird languages. I found this funny because it makes me think German speakers as the anti-chauvinists or something like that. Where people would objectify women, they genderize objects and words. I do not see the point of the word dog being a masculine word when it changes based on a dog’s gender anyway. The whole thing just feels complicated. Not sure how much that makes sense to yall, but I thought it was funny.

Also, I feel that as much as German speakers love their rules, they love their exceptions to those rules. Trying to learn all the forms of verbs and on top of that all the unlogically formed verbs it got confusing. I’m starting to be a stronger believer in just learning vocabulary. If the other participant in the conversation is a natural speaker they can read between the words and make sense of just the basic words I would blur out. This was supposed to be a short post, but I ended up yammering on and on. Still good to write sometimes about the studies so people from my home Uni who read this don’t think I’m just fooling around. See you next week with my next posts, they gonna be big.