Ah, excitement.

I really love the U-Bahn. It’s the cleanest and most efficient public transportation I’ve ever seen. There are screens everywhere with clearly stated train lines with destinations and arrival times, and the escalators! Ha! They stop intermittently but if you step on the pad at the top or the bottom, they start! This way they can be everywhere but not only conserve electricity in off-peak times, but serve the rush-hour direction at need! Isn’t that clever!? Once you get the hang of it, it’s really not so bad, either. Just kind of annoying when you’re about to step on and someone on the other side steps on first. Thwarted! But it’s all good.

Yesterday was another example of our Hausfrau’s iron-clad control… a group of us we were summarily kicked out because the people with us had “alkohol” as opposed to “Bier” — the latter is acceptable, but apparently, Beer != Alkohol in Germany, because of the age difference of purchase (16 for Bier, 18 for Alkohol). (One of the guys was turning 21 at midnight, so it was a celebration.) We all made our way to the Englisher Garten instead, which was all right I suppose, though we didn’t go to the Bier Garten. (That’s for this afternoon.) Instead we relaxed on the grass and spoke in broken German until ten-ish, when I insisted we go home, so at least I could sleep. A few of the group broke off to go to a club (Am Mittwoch? Sie sind sehr verrückt!) but I happily went home.

Today in class we went over a lot of things, more than I expected we could accomplish in one class. The amount we cover daily is staggering. It’s about equivalent to one week’s worth of my German class back at school, so missing one day (which several of our number miss routinely) is pretty terrible. You miss so much information, it’s sort of crazy. We seem to do an entire grammatical principle every class; today it was conjunctions.

Grammar discussion time! (Beware. For convenience, I’ve indented it, if you want to skip it, hehe.) In English, you have coordinating and suboordinating conjunctions, which serve different purposes in the connection of clauses. (And, or, but, nor, since, because, etc.) In German, you have the same, but because word order is intrinsically important in German, it’s very, very important you know which kind of konjunction you’re using so you keep the word order correct. We learned the German “because” — weil – and that when you use it, you have to scoot the verbs around in the suboordinated clause a little bit. So the English translation of a sentence we learned is: “She could not come to the party, because she sick was.” (She ist nicht zur Party gekommen, weil sie Krank war.) In English of course you wouldn’t say it like that, unless you’re Yoda. Hehe. To use “weil” in German you have to move the verb in the second clause to the end. Crazy! Of course, if you want to use “denn,” which is German for “then/because/since” essentially, you can use it like you would in English: “I am satisfied, since I have already learned a lot.” (Ich bin zufrieden, denn ich habe schon viel gelernt.) Fun, eh? I loooove that I can immediately translate things she says, like the Hauptsatz is the main clause and the Nebensatz is the suboordinated clause.

And I really need to think more carefully when writing, because I keep misusing the Dativ case. Grr. Dative is used for Indirect Objects, and I keep not realizing which is the IO and DO. (The Direct Object takes the Akkusativ case.) Gah! So in the sentence “I am brushing my teeth” in German, the “my” needs to be Dativ, and the “teeth” and its article need to be Akkusativ. *Tears hair out* She keeps confusing people with her roundabout explanations in German, but most of the people who are most confused have English as a third or fourth language, even after German, so they’ve just got to tough it. I feel terrible for the people who are starting German fresh at Goethe. How can you learn German without understanding half of what the Lehrerin says? Somehow.

But what if English is not your first (or second, or third) language? The Taiwanese girl next to me in class usually asks me to explain things, but I’m always caught in the language gap, as her English is marginally better than her German, and so I need to look up a word in my English-German dictionary, and then she looks it up in her German-Chinese dictionary. Today she had an issue with pronouns. (We… all did. We took a quiz yesterday and we all got about half of the questions right.) Anyway in English, you have:

I | me | my | mine
you | you | your | yours
he | him | his | his
she | her |her | hers
it | it | its |its
we | us | our | ours
you | you | your | yours
they | them | their | theirszum Beispiel: (for example:)

I have : “I” is nominative
You gave me : “me” is objective
my book : “my” is possessive, nominative case
That’s mine : “mine” is possessive, objective case

In English, you only have to worry about the cases in terms of whether or not it’s nominative (used as a subject) or objective (used as an object, usually in the predicate of the sentence). As native speakers, we convert it naturally. No worries. You give the book to him, not to he. This is much harder in German. German has the objective case, but they divide it further into two: accusative and dative, depending on the kind of object, direct or indirect. Then there’s another case entirely that we haven’t learned: genitive. It’s essentially German shorthand for possessives; the book of my teacher becomes my teacher’s book, through adding endings to words, rather than using the English “-’s” ending.

To give you even more of an idea… The first person singular (I/me/my/mine) is an example of what German pronouns are like. There are pretty much as many pronouns as there are possibilities… then you have pronouns that are in different cases. Oh, man! So many pronouns! What’s worse, is you have formal and informal as well. That’s what was confusing the heck out of Victoria — she wasn’t understanding when you use sie or Sie. Gah!!!! *falls over* “sie geht”/”sie gehen”/”Sie gehen” are all… different. You could say the same thing about the English “you” — unless of course you solve part of the problem with “yinz” or “y’all.” This is why we’re doing so much grammar. Unless you get a good understanding of it, how can you ever expect to hold a competent conversation? Remembering conjugated verb tenses isn’t nearly as bad as this. (More grammar? Look here.)

Anyway. *pokes audience* Wake up! I know you were bored stiff through all of that. Tonight is the Stammtisch at Murphy’s again, but now we’ve understood that Murphy’s is less about the going there on time and spending money than it is as a meeting place for all of Goethe, “off-campus” shall we say. I am meeting a group of people at Goethe at 4, at Englisher Garten at 7, then another at 8:30, then at the Stammtisch at 9:30. Yay for meeting and hanging out with people! And speaking broken German! *giggles* I’m getting phenominally better, I just need to write up and practice some vocabulary on index cards. I just wish I had room to take German in the fall… I could, potentially, but I really do want to take poetry, fiction, and screenwriting. Miiight be too much writing. I could hold off on Poetry or Screenwriting… But I’ve done creative writing every fall since sophomore year, and it might be bad luck… gah. I want to continue with German, though! Auditing might drive me crazy, especially as my one English class (as opposed to writing) is going to be… intense. To say the least. That’s about 10 hours a week of work. *bangs head on wall* Ah, well. Languages are a lot of homework, anyway, when they’re not taught in this sort of environment; homework is the only way to ensure 5 days a week of practice.

Anyway, enough rambling! I shall update later on my goings on at the Stammtisch, and eventually on my many accumulated musings on German thingies. (Like 0,50 Euro bathrooms! Bah!)

Bis später!