It's been over a week since my latest transition, but I wasn't sure at first how I felt about it. Last Monday, I started my 4-week course at the Goethe-Institut and moved downtown with a German woman named Dorothee (housing arranged by the Goethe-Institut). I had been super-excited to meet her, get to know some international students, and finally have formal instruction to complement my day-to-day practice. The thing was, Dorothee was gone all last week, chaperoning her elementary school class on a field trip. And I was miserable in class because I was slightly better than my classmates and the lessons largely consisted of things I already knew. This was not what I had signed up for.
Now I can say, though, that I am delighted with my new situation. I switched to a higher level mid-week, and my new class is very stimulating. I haven't had such a language-oriented German class since high school, and it's great. (My PSU courses were more content-based, so I never had to memorize lists of words, as long as I could express ideas about the literature or history we were studying.) It's good for me to work on my weakness: German verbs and their dizzying combinations with prepositions and nouns. Since I got here, my philosophy in speaking German has been "fake it till you make it:" say things in a way that makes sense to me, and hope others figure out my meaning. But the daily structure of homework and being called on in class is a powerful motivator. Plus, the teacher makes it really fun, with lots of discussions and comparisons to our own cultures and languages.
There's quite a mix of people, though most are college-aged and about half hail from Eastern Europe. Among my classmates and others I've met are an Egyptian mother of two, an Italian monk, a Peruvian architect, and a Mongolian college professor. 7 of my 14 classmates speak Russian (1 from Tajikistan, 1 from Ukraine, 1 from Kazakhstan, and 4 from Russia, including the rhyming ones in the title). In their honor, with Ukrainian Katerina's painstaking translation and constant laughter, I joined the Cyrillic-alphabet equivalent of Facebook. I love the fact that I've only met 2 other Americans here and nobody tries to speak English with me.
After a week alone in her apartment, I finally met Dorothee on Sunday. As I had suspected from her furnishings, we had more in common than teaching: she loves French language and culture as well as classical music, and walks around singing fragments from Johann Strauss' opera "Die Fledermaus." What I hadn't guessed was pretty fascinating: she spent twelve years in the theatre, released a CD, and founded a Montessori school (!) before planting herself in a roomful of seven-year-olds the last several years. Her daughter is following in her footsteps: she's studying modern dance and theatre, and has won several German film awards. I have the impression that Dorothee knows how to thoroughly enjoy life, and it seems contagious.
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