Deutschkurs!

The semester starter last week, on 24th Oct.  In Germany, we have Winter and Summer semesters.  The Summer semester starts in the beginning of April, and the exams for most classes wrap up at the beginning of August.  The Winter semester begins in October, with most exams wrapping up at the end of February.  So, classes started last week, I was on vacation, so I started this week.

This class is for Ph.D. students and is appropriately handled for those of us who have irregular schedules and don't coordinate with each other; it's held in the evenings from 6-8pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, you can join at any time, and you can participate as actively as you want.  Our lecturer, Mr. B., is a gentleman probably between 65 and 70 with a few inches of longish white hair encircling his head.  It's a basic level course, but he speaks German to the class the entire time.  During the last three months, I've absorbed German like a sponge... like a sponge in my shower before I put a third of a bottle of Rohrfrei (literally "pipe free", as in free the pipe) in it three weeks ago.  For a "basic" level course, it's quite challenging.  People have joined the class at significantly different levels.  I probably fall halfway on the scale.  Some students are already able to hold a conversation and ask questions in German, and they are probably the ones benefiting the most at the moment.  I welcome the challenge of total immersion and follow along as best as I can, but the endurance of my attention doesn't quite match the length and speed of the class.  It would be nice if we took breaks to practice with each other during the class time.  I met a beautiful chemical engineering student from Iraq who has been here one month and seems to feel constantly behind.  Just under twenty people attended tonight's class, while twelve attended Monday's class.  When my mind wanders because I can't keep up with his lecture, I wonder if my colleagues' smiles are for amusement at his conversation with himself or at amusement of lack of understanding, or both

I actually do learn a lot from Mr. B.'s conversation with himself.  On Monday, he handed out a worksheet with a diagram of a man and numbered lines drawn to different body parts.  We went through them one by one, and identified about half of them during the class before moving on to an exercise on conjunctions.  One of the most common ways an foreigner (Auslander) gives him/herself away is by confusing genders and the gendered articles 'die', der', and 'das'.  Sometimes one can apply phonetic rules (most monosyllabic nouns that end in multiple consonants are masculine), but of course those have exceptions, or guess based on the meaning of the word, like words for mother, father, breast, etc.  If you don't know the gender of the word, there's a good chance you'll choose the wrong singular article from die/der/das, and choose the wrong plural ending.  For just about every body part, Mr. B. conversed about it for 5-10 minutes, why the word for hair is neuter, for example, how to say the one hair on his held he held up, how to correctly describe the other three hairs he thinks he has, etc.  I then tuned in and out as he went around the class and poked fun of the different accents of the students and their countries of origin, especially Great Britain (I love the name Gross Britannien) and China, and those students poked back Mr. B. smirked at them.  I haven't given myself away yet...let's see what I can do to keep it that way :-)

Tonight we learned how to describe times, among other things.  In German, the in order in which you say a number between 20 and 99 is reversed from English.  For example, 26 is 'sechs und zwanzig', literally six and twenty.  Now that we've got that down, draw a face clock, and draw a vertical line down the middle.  If the minutes are less than thirty, then the minutes, then 'nach', then the hour.  6:10 literally becomes ten after six.  If the minutes are more than thirty, then say the minutes, then 'vor', then the next hour.  6:40 literally becomes twenty before seven.  6:30 becomes halb seben - half seven.  If you're within 5 minutes of the half hour, then you adapt nach and vor relative to that, e.g. 6:26 becomes vier nach halb seben - four before half seven.  The quarter (viertel) gets confusing: for 6:15, you can say either viertel nach seks, or viertel seben.  6:45 can be viertel vor seben, drei viertel seben, or ein viertel vor seben.  Got it??  Sure, that's a lot, but we actually have similar options in English.  Of course, you can speak the hour followed by the minutes like we do, which is what the announcements at the train station, airport, and on the radio give, but that is not normal conversational speech here.

Stay tuned for a quiz!