An Adventurous Language-I

As I mentioned in my earlier post it is more than important to learn and learn well the German language for an eventful stay in Germany; the stay may still be eventfull in other case but may not be pleaseantly eventful. In the last semester (Summer 2008) I embarked on improving my German language skills. The journey (hard and fought) was two act play.

The initial attempt was non intensive, twice a week course. The class size was good for individual to ask questions and discuss and the environment was freindly enough. As the class progressed our ideas about the language started to evolve like a sine function, somoetimes we thought its that easy and other times it seems above our intellectual abilities to learn it. The later thought overpowered the initial thinking more frequently. The first time I feel that its hard when I learnt that there are three types of gender for classification of each noun. Unlike English where we use “the”, in the German we have three variations der – for masculine, die – for feminine and das – for neutral. But the problem is that it is not the actual noun (person or place) that has gender but infact the word that is used to represent that noun.For instance one common example that is used in this regard is that of car, its has two words Auto and Wagen, but the interesting thing is that auto is das Auto (neutral) and wagen is der Wagen (masculine). In addition it is also mandatory to capitilize noun, so if you ever happen to read a German transcript then do not confuse the capitalization of nouns with proper noun. The first exam happened to be total disastrous as I struggle to remember the articles (die der das) for nouns. Second exam was good as there were no more articles and we moved on to some more advance materials.

In August I took the second course, it was four week intensive course. This time our class was truly a global class, whole of the world was somehow represented. From far East Asia to Europe, Australia to South America and from Africa to United Sates; a blend of all cultures. As the language course was intensive so I got the opportunity to practice it more and slight improvement was also made. It was amazing to learn about the cultures and tradition of so many different nations and to know “How do we do that….” was good addition to experience. The claim that I improve my German can be substantiated on the fact that at the end of the course I was able to understand a German song . The song was quite simple and when hearing we were having the lyrics of the song so it was not that diffiult to understand what the singer was trying to convey. By the way the song title was “Willst du mit mir gehn?” The video is as below and the German lyrics are here and English translation can be found here.