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Wednesday, January 21

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Nein? Ich auch.

I say this (in German, duh) because of a class I had yesterday. My first class of the week (well, my 3rd officially, but one was cancelled and one was early) was a German language class with this new teacher guy. He's a jolly German type, with a weird, not-funny, sense of humour, but he seems pleasant enough. Anyway, I was the only one in the class, not bad considering there's only supposed to be two of us anyway, but at least I made the effort to attend (well, that class at any rate).

We chatted for quite a while, in German, about all manner of things, including a long bit on the English legal system. This being the first time he'd ever heard me speak German, he wrote little notes as we went along, and in the second hour we went through them, highlighting the things I do wrong when I speak. A few of them I knew already, such as my quite drastically limited vocabulary, but a couple of other points were enlightening.

The first was that I am very fluent when I speak, in that I get my meaning across all of the time. However, this is often by accident. Basically, I use the wrong words, but they are still sufficient to get the meaning across. For instance, at one point I said "Ich habe es am Fern gesieht." I thought that that was how you said "I saw it on TV", but it turns out the correct way is "Ich habe es im Fernsehen gesehen." Now, my first attempt was grammatically wrong in one area ('am' not 'im'), had the wrong word in another ('Fern' not 'Fernsehen') and contained an incorrect derivative of a verb at the end ('gesieht' rather than 'gesehen'). However, the meaning still came across, if imperfectly. What I need to improve on is picking and using the right words at the right time.

The second point came up because at one point I said "zu bekommen" as the phrase "to become." Of course, the correct word is just "werden". I have no idea why I said what I did, but I mentioned that the mistake probably came about because I was translating too quickly in my head. My teacher leapt onto that point (not literally) and told me that I needed to train myself to actually think in German, not to translate. Now, I know for a fact that I have got better at that in the past year, but evidently I'm not good enough yet.

He then took me to this place in my university called the Open Learning Centre. It's in the Modern Languages department, and I didn't even know it existed. It's a cool big room, with a load of computers in the middle, each with headphones attached. There's also a row of TVs along another side, each with headphones again, and a number of foreign language channels available. They have video players with a wide selection of films to watch, and many foreign newspapers and magazines. Basically, it's a room with loads of resources for studying foreign languages.

My teacher recommended me to take a blank video in there and record some German news programmes from the TV. I should then watch it a lot at home, in order to get used to just hearing German all the time. Umm, yeah, I might get round to that eventually. Got more important things to be doing right now, such as, erm, doing nothing. Hurrah.

What else has been happening? I've started to get on top of the work which I was behind on from last week. One and a half weeks into the new term, and I'm already behind. That's a new personal record, I reckon. And I've still got that fucking German Law essay to write. I'm promising myself that I will either do it tomorrow afternoon or over the weekend. At any rate, before Monday. Likelihood of success? Minimal. What with my intention to do nothing. Not quite sure how the two are going to meet each other.

I almost forgot: I went to an Arsenal match last night. My first in about 6 years, almost to the day in fact. A match which we promptly lost. Fuck's sake. I reckon I'm a bad luck charm. Either that, or it was the fact that we had a team of youngsters on the pitch. One of the two, methinks. That'll probably be the last game I make it to for a while, what with it being impossible to get a ticket, and it being so goddamn expensive. Stupid capitalism invading football. Grrr.

That's about all I can think of. Oh, go join RAGE. Best decision you'll ever make. And it's oh-so-free!!!


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