Today I finished the A1 module of my German course. It feels good to hit the first milestone!
I was also pleased to find out that I finished at the top of my class. It isn’t too surprising, though, and not just because I am a language professional. Most of the other students are relatively recent arrivals to Germany (arriving in the past 1-3 months), while I have been here since December. It’s a lot easier to pick up on the basics when I have been working on them for so long!
I am also finding German both easier and harder than I expected. The grammar is so much easier than everyone made it out to be. Declension makes perfect sense if you’re used to thinking about things like direct objects (accusative) and indirect objects (dative). I’ve never learned a language with cases before, but it isn’t so bad. And the sentence structure, although complex, is so logical!
The hardest part so far is gender. I know all the rules, but re-learning gender is difficult. I keep wanting to map new vocabulary words onto their Spanish gender. One of my classmates has it even harder, though. She speaks some Dutch, and she says that even though a lot of the nouns are very, very similar, the genders are all different! That would be really tough.
I have a day off tomorrow, which I am looking forward to. Then on Wednesday it’s back to class—the first A2 module begins!
Expat Linguist 