Franconian Beer Message Board
OT: learning German |
| Posted by Nick B. on 2013-11-30 01:41:31 |
| Agreed, 100%. I don't mean to be ein Spaßverderber, but as someone who learnt the language after having moved here (*), I honestly don't see that trying to learn online, part-time, in advance of a visit will bring all that much. Good to try, and exercising parts of the brain that haven't been used in decades is a good thing to do, just don't have high expectations of big improvements before the trip, without investing significant amounts of time and effort. And that also means speaking about very simple things at the Stammtisch in German, not in-depth conversations with your friends in English. Another thing our group did was speak only German during breaks and when we would meet after class, which we often did. I was lucky to be the only Yank there and the others were very dedicated, and the only Briton(ess) could already speak German too, so there wasn't the thing of having a shared mother tongue as a temptation. Mrs didn't really learn much aside from through me the first year here, and after she took a two-week, one-on-one, 5x45 minute course with my teacher, we were diligent about speaking as little English as possible for a long time, especially when out and about, among the people. This habit of speaking our newly-found second language carried over into our "hols", which occasionally led to interesting results in pubs in England. Once, a gal sitting at the next table over said to her later-arriving companion, "Don't mention the war," nodding to us. "Don't worry, we helped you lot win it". Another time, we got Hitler salutes, though they were laughing about it. They didn't stop even after they learnt we were Yanks, either. It was also interesting to visit the US (Orygun) after having been here a couple of years. Here, when you hear someone speaking a different language than the native one or English, it doesn't cause attention. But our speaking German raised eyebrows all the time in Portland. That was an interesting experience, being back in your former hometown (**) and conversing so that no one could understand you. In the NL and Belgium, people seem to be as happy to speak German with us as English. Peter at the fabulous Café Demmers in Naarden-Vesting prefers German to English, FWIW, and I think I've heard this about Dirk in Antwerp too. You people can practice your German in the Benelux! * I did have one semester of Deutsch in college, which was enough to learn that there was such a thing as "der/die/das" (but not "den/dem/des/dative-der") and "ich/mich/mir/du/dich/dir/Sie/Ihnen/sie/ihnen/ihr/euch/wir/uns" in place of "I/me/you/they/them/we/us", but not how to use them all properly. And of course, nothing about the variances in sentence structure based on which conjunction one uses (because vs. since, for example). So as a tourist here, I could correctly ask for "ein Bier", but would make mistakes asking for "ein Kaffee", for example. And heaven forfend someone would say something back in German! ** Yes, yes, I know, we're not native Oregonians. Well, that certainly went on too long. |