Blog 10/7

Today we learned simple conversation in stores and restaurant, vocabulary of the different furniture. Interesant (interesting) thing is that, in German each piece of furniture has its own sexuality. For example, Teppich (carpet) is male and Couch is female. According to our teacher, it’s just a convention and we just need to memorize everything.

        Oh my, I just realized that I haven’t introduced my classmates and my housemate yet… Doing it now. There are zwolf (twelve) students in my class. Most of them kommt us den (come from) USA. Two from France, one from Britain and one from Japan. More than half of them are students and the other half are ingeneur(engineer), tanzerin(dancer), professor and entrepreneur. They are all sehr (very) nice—we struggle together afterall : )

        And my housemate is from Madawaska. She speaks really good German and has been a German teacher for fungf (five) years. Her English is not as good as her German but enough for us to communicate. She is really open-minded and funny. We cooked together and plan to go shopping together on Saturday. 

Blog 9/7

         Today we learned about how to describe our family members to other people and ask others if they are married (It’s gonna important if you want to find a boyfriend/girlfriend here :P). It is a lot in one day for us beginners, but I’m surprised by how much I remembered when I was doing my homework. I think it has to do with the flexible teaching style of our teacher. His English is great but he only speaks German in class along with his gestures. He also encourages student-to-student interaction—we often have to get up and hold a conversation with my peers in German using what we learned. He also trained us to get useful information out of a trunk of hard text and an authentic German audio. I wirklish (really) feel like I’m learning a lot and also finde (find) myself enjoying the classes.

       

        I went to buy some German sausage in the supermarket close to my host family and cooked it for dinner. It is really tasty and there were so many different kinds of sausage, too—there was a whole section for sausage in the market. I probably won’t be able to try every one of them in the month I’m here as much as I’d love to.

        So, Gute Nacht (Good night) ~~

Blog 8/7

Today we got our textbook (Coursebouch in German). We learned about more different careers, including how to hold a short conversation about career. We also learned how to ask and answer simple question about where people live. And as English, German also has conjugates. We studied conjugates of simple verbs like kommen(come), haben(have) and arberten(work).

I found a really nice bakery on my way to Goethe Institut and had my breakfast there. It’s sooooo good!! I also got my monthly train ticket. You could take any train, metro and bus with it within July. It’s very convenient.

        For dinner, I had two buns with chocolate stuffing at the same bakery. It’s amazing!!

        Now I’m doing my homework in a café near Goethe Institute. After I’m done, I’ll go back home. 

Blog 7/7

I arrived Germanmy last night and stayed at my host Babara's  house. I have a furnished room all to myself and Babara also has a small garden next to the house. There are plenty of fruits and vegetables she planted.

The course started today. It's from 1:15pm to 5:45pm. We learned a lot more than I would expected as a beginner class. We finished greetings, alphabet, counting from 0 to 20, words for different countries and different jobs--our teacher call them "profession". I could tell from now that these four weeks would not be easy, but I am excited to learn more!

Goethe Institut also provide a culture program to help students learn more about German culture including fashion tour, museum tour, trip to concentration camp, Shakespeare's play and so on. Most activities and tours are free but some you do have to pay. I'm really interested in the trip to concentration camp. I'll probably sign up for that tomorrow.

And now I should go do my homework, it's due tomorrow after all~

Departure Date

I will leave for Berlin on July 5th from Pittsburgh after finishing Summer Session 1.