Last week was spend trying to understand more about the German language. I’ve been attending
the so-called intensive German course offered to all exchange students. The course is seven
hours a day, starting at 9:15. As I’m not at all used to speak and hear German all day long, I’ve
been really tired when I got home in the evening.
The course is a mixed experience… We start each day with an hour where we talk about
grammatical problems. This usually means that our teacher gives us some exercises, and asks
us to do a number of them. After 10 minutes he will interrupt us, expecting us to be finished.
But I need much more than 10 minutes to go through these exercises, and so do many of the
other in our class! He will then be talking about “interesting” parts of the German grammar,
but that’s all theory — we don’t get to train it.
I find this a great waste of time, for I don’t learn anything when he just talks about the structure
of “Nebensätze” or what not — I need exercises afterwards. And here’s the crucial point,
which some might call naïve: I don’t want to do the exercises by myself when I get home. First
of all I don’t have any energy for German grammar exercises when I get home, and second,
when doing an intensive full-day course, then I expected us to be doing the work at the course.
I don’t want to spend seven hours a day just to get pointers about what I could do when I get
home.
In the other six hours each day we have mostly been fooling around. Each day brings a new
theme, such as “Education”, “Emotional Intelligence”, “Ethic and the Society”, and so on. We
then read a short text about the subject, and discuss it with each other at our tables. That’s
all very fine if it weren’t for all the acting and presentations that we’ve made.
We have several times had to do small presentations about the subjects, and today we even
had to pretend that we were guests in a TV show. I think these things draw the focus away
from the subject of the course: learning German. We spend our energy thinking if sport or
physics are a necessary part of a general education, we spend time thinking about our role as
a wealthy manager for the TV show, etc.
I understand that we speak German while doing these things, and that we train with the
language as we do so. But I really do feel that there must be a better way than this indirect
way. And when we just talk with each other, then I’m afraid that we wont learn about our
mistakes — I make lots of mistakes when speaking, and so do the people I’m speaking with.
Do we get any better at German by exchanging errors like that?
Oh well… I’ll be there next week too. Hopefully that will be better, also because I’m attending
a workshop where I’ll have a chance of learning a little bit of Swiss-German. I can already
understand some of it, but it would be cool to understand more!