I finished my 8 lessons of German 3. This is a semi-private course at the teacher’s place. I think it is much better than the classroom course offered at the Vancouver school. The class is smaller, each of us get more time. The environment is less formal, that encourage us to speak freely. The level 3 of German stop at after introducing the pass tense. My pronunciation is still not very good, but I am getting better not to pronounce the words in the English way. I understand all the grammar rules taught so far, but sometimes forgot when to use them. The vocabulary is my weakest area, unlike other students who has a German speaking other half to practice with, I know no Deutche speaker around me. There will be two more extra classes before I go to German. I’ll decide whether I want to continue the lessons after I come back. I couldn’t find too much of use of learning German, but it’s kinda waste giving it up after a year of learning. Language is something you quickly forget if you don’t use it every once a while. I had set up another rule for myself that if I decide to travel somewhere, I will at least start learning the basic of that language a year ahead of time.

In today’s German class, the teacher offered us some bubbling wine to celebrate her admission to UBC education program. It seems that we have alcohol in every one of the past few German classes. It’s nice to have beer or wine and learn at the same time. The environment is really friendly, much better than class room style of teaching. We held lots of conversation in German, but due to my lack of ability, I can barely follow the talks, never mind taking part in it. I read out allow my composition and had it corrected by the teacher. I made lots and lots mistakes, especially on word order and the use of preposition. My vocabulary is still very weak, really need to memorize more verbs, nouns and adjectives. I can understand all the grammar rules well, just often forgot to apply them in my sentences. My pronouncation is the worst of all, but I couldn’t really help on that part, I have no one to practice German with. Hope with my beginner level German, I can survival the two weeks World Youth Day trip in August.

German level 3 is much harder than German level 2 I had taken last term. The class is much smaller, and we had to speak in German for practice. The teacher also speaks a lot more German this time, even though she is speaking slow, I could only understand about 50%. There was one grandma in the class started German level 1 with me back then, and two woman from my German level 2 class. There are also two new guys join us this time. Out of the six people in the group, four has a German boyfriend / girlfriend. Oddly enough, the grandma is one of them. And no, my girlfriend is not a German. I guess love is a major factor pushing someone to learn a new language. For the remaining two, which is me and another guy, the motivation of learning is to visit German in near future. With this much more in depth training, I hope I’ll at least able to carry out basic conversation during the World Youth Day in August.

Today is the last day of my level 2 German class. So far I had took 16 classes, my German is still pretty bad, especially my pronunciation. This time I get enough people interested in continuing to study the next level. Hopefully my German will be better when I go to World Youth Day in August. I gota find some time to review all I have learnt so far, probably organize them in an excel spreadsheet.

Tonight, in the second half of my German lesson, the whole class went to a German restaurant for dinner. We had to order our food and talked to the waitress in deutsche. It is the first experience to use German outside classroom, and I realize how poor my German is. One of the classmate brough along his German girlfriend. Some more advanced classmates can chat with her without much problem. Of course, my German is so bad that I can’t even understand half of their conversation, let alone join them in the talk.

Still, I have a great time guessing what does those sentence means and picked up a few useful vocabulary. Most important, now I feel more comfortable in an all-German environment.