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Language School

 Guten Abend!

The weather was cold and sunny today. Even Germany has those days when the sky is cloudless and blue, and the temps are south of freezing. Their negative-something is still our twenty-something. But I must be acclimating to milder Germany, because I was genuinely cold today.

I included a photo of our apartment living room, partly because I don't have any other pictures to accompany this post. On that big TV screen I've watched, all in German, "Death in Paradise", plus the movies "Gone With the Wind", "Harry Potter", "Titanic", and many more, plus countless documentaries. They have dubbed multitudes of American and British shows, which is good practice for us language learners. Some of the docus are German-made, and I've 'fallen in love' with astronaut and scientist Ulrich Walter, who has an excellent show, and who speaks very clear standard German. 

So, I have started my language course of which I have no idea what I'm going to do with back in Alaska, but which I have paid for, and so should engage in. If nothing else, they say learning another language is supposed to be good insurance against dementia. 

In Europe, they have a system of classifying the level of language competence a person has. They have three levels, A, B, & C, and two levels of each of those, thus A1, A2, B1, etc. The A level is the beginner level; B is the intermediate, and C is the advanced. In fact, C2 is considered native speaker. I know one American guy who can speak German at a C2, plus Yu'pik, Norwegian, French, and several other languages, PLUS, English, which is his native tongue. To get granted a permanent residence visa, you have to show you can speak at least at a B1 level, proven by a test. For a foreigner to get citizenship or go to the university, you have to have a C1 level, also proven by a test. 

We signed up for the language courses to be able to get a residence visa. That's all over and done with, now for reasons explained at length in a previous blog. And now I've attended two days of classes. However, my ill-luck, if you can call it that, still holds. My first day...

The 8:24 am bus never showed up. I know I was in the right place at the right time, for I had fellow would-be passengers all standing there checking their phones and/or watches, and in typical German fashion saying nothing to each other. I wanted to say, "I'm going to be late for my first day of language school!", and I could have said it in German too, but as no one else was complaining out loud, I bit my tongue. 

So, we waited until the 8:44 am bus. It showed up, and I got off at my stop, or what I thought was my stop just before 9 am, when the class was supposed to start. I rushed into the language school building only to be told that I should have gotten an email explaining that my class was in a building 8 minutes walk from there. I probably got it a month ago, decided to wait to read it closer to time, and then forgot about it. Ugh! 

I zipped my coat back up and headed out, with no real idea where the building was, and with my lack of navigation sense. Even Google maps wasn't much help. Fortunately, I have roamed these streets for the past 4 months. It only helped when I put the phone away and looked for specific streets I knew about. I got there 15 minutes late, and got the odd seat in the back of the room, under the slanted ceiling. Being the Dachgeschoss, or 'under the roof level' the room conformed to the roof outside. Yes, I was the 13th student. I like 13, however. So much for superstition. 

I felt like inserting another photo, so this one is taken from the middle of the second section of a typical bus. It was not very full that day. The middle is like an accordion, and pivots when the bus turns corners. The screen above shows the next stops and how long before we arrive at them. 

When it was partner-up time, I was the third wheel with a lady older than me, and a Vietnamese young lady, neither of which could pronounce German in a way that I could begin to understand. They were really sweet people, but today I made sure I sat across the room from them when I actually got there early because the bus showed up today, and I knew where I was going. I wound up sitting with a young guy from Michigan who I could understand in German. However, it's too tempting to cheat and use English in a pinch, so I might have to see if I can find a different non-English-speaking partner tomorrow. 

I think the class will really help me with my German language skills, but I still wonder what I'm going to do with it when I get back home. Will I just let it fade away? I hope not. 

Bis bald


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