I’ve completed a bit over a month of German class. After the initial two week introduction, the class size grew quite a bit and now there are more adults. Still nobody speaks English though (including the teacher), which I find odd only because everybody else in the city seems to speak it fine. We lost the gal from Beirut but added a guy from Bosnia, two guys from Brazil, a guy from Italy, and a woman from Portugal. The damn kids are still in there. We got a new teacher as well. He is from Austria originally and looks exactly like you would picture a German teacher to look. He’s really cool though and ends up laughing quite a bit as we struggle through.
The pace of the class has really picked up and we are now in the midst of learning all the good stuff. Having 6 different words for ‘the’ can be confusing to a lad from Lacey. For example, one of the practice sentences would have translated word for word to: Now, open the man the child the door. The meaning of the sentence once you replace ‘the’ with the correct cases is: Now, the man opens the door for the child. Just for completeness for those learning at home, the actual German sentence was: Jetzt, öffnet der Mann dem Kind die Tür. You can see how practical my understanding is so far.
We had a test on Thursday and got the results back on Friday. The scale here, from worst to best, is 1 to 6. I got a 5 which was the second best grade in the class behind the Italian dude. The grades the children got brought them to tears. If they would stop messing around a pay attention maybe they wouldn’t cry like little babies.
Anyway, not terribly interesting but this is pretty much what I’ve been up to (aside from working very hard, J and Steve) so that is what you get to read today. It could be worse. You could be reading about what Chizzy does from day-to-day, which from what I can gather involves a lot of trying to figure out how to get a data storage device shipped from the Netherlands to the UK.
Gute Arbeit! Warum wir nicht überrascht sind, erhielten Sie das zweite beste prüfen Kerbe in der Kategorie. Wir wußten, daß Sie großes tun würden.
Bryan, June 13, 2005 06:24 PM:Ich verstehe nicht. Impressive, Pa. I needed the dictionary to read most of that. If that is where you are at with your lessons, you are still well beyond me. In fact, I noticed fairly quickly that my class isn't geared to getting you up and speaking quickly. A lot of grammar and vocab, but nothing practical like a Berlitz would teach you. They pretty much leave it up to you to make sense of most of it. Hopefully, that day will come sometime in the next couple months.
Hey, how are you able to type the German characters in there? I figured out how to use html to get umlaut characters, but I know there has to be a way to simply type them into Word and stuff.
Also, I lose out once again on "son of the year" award. I forgot your birthday again. Every year I promise I will remember, but I never do. I even was talking to you guys on Skype that weekend and still didn't figure it out. Sorry about that. Happy late Birthday old man.
Mom & Dad, June 13, 2005 07:29 PM:We cheated. I'm not really sure how far along your dad is in his lessons, but he did find a website that will do free language translations, so that is what we used. Here is the site. http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr We were wondering if you would be able to read what we wrote. We just wanted to congratulate you on getting one of the top scores on your test and let you know we knew you would do great in your class.