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Friday, November 5, 2010

German Training

If you look at the dates of my posts you will see that it's been quite a while since I have posted.  There is a very good reason for this long delay.  In a word: German! I don't remember having that much trouble learning Spanish but trying to learn German made me feel kind of dumb. The method used and the Foreign Service Institute is fondly referred to as the fire hose method.  On day one our instructor started speaking German to us and asking us questions in German.  The idea is that you will absorb it through your pores.  They did give us some grammar lessons but I found myself fondly remembering those stupid dialogues that we had to memorize for spanish.  I just wanted a few "Esta Susana en casa? Si. Ella esta con una amiga." of the german variety to sit in my head for easy reference.

For 30 weeks we had class for four hours a day and were expected to put in that amount of time additionally on our own.  We listened to German news, read German magazines and wrote essays in German and practiced and practiced.  The grading system for the Foreign Service is on a scale of 0 to 5.  0 is no German and 5 is a well educated native speaker.  For his job, Bob is supposed to get a 3.  A 3 is when you can speak about nuclear proliferation and the recent insurgencey in the middle east in good solid German with fairly sophisticated grammar.  You may make some small mistakes but no glaring ones.

The German department gives it's students 30 weeks to get to a 3.  Now, it has been my history that if I put effort into something I generally meet or exceed my own expectations and if I don't make an effort I get mediocre results. I don't think I have worked this hard at anything I've done before and after 30 weeks I earned a whopping.... 2.  Well, fortunately for my ego, I wasn't alone.  Bob did similarly and so did many of the other German students that we have met at FSI. In the Foreign Service, I am what is known as an EFM which stands for Eligible Family Member, meaning that I'm Bob's wife.  Bob was given an additional 16 weeks in German class where as I, as an EFM, was not offered that... opportunity... punishment (depending on the frustration level of the day).  On one hand I was really sad that my time in the department was over.  I truely enjoyed the comradery and having a reason to get out of the apartment each morning. I liked the challenge of learning something new, and it was frustrating that a goal had been set and I hadn't reached it.  I met some wonderful people and I miss seeing them every day.  On the other hand, it was really hard and 7 months is a long time to work that hard on one thing, so it was a real relief for it to be over. I can carry on a decent conversation and at the moment I'm reading Harry Potter: der Stein der Weisen.  That's the first Harry Potter book in German. On some pages I almost feel like I'm reading in english and other pages I have read two or three times before I really understand what I'm reading.  I keep my dictionary handy but try to figure out the meaning from context before I look anything up. I'm really happy with what I have achieved.

My next challenge is not to forget how to speak German before we go to Frankfurt.  Originally we were to leave toward the end of November (this month), but with Bob's extension we won't be leaving until next March.  Advice I was given by a couple of my instructors is to narrate your life in German.  This keeps your mouth used to speaking German and your brain used to forming German sentences.  You also have to remember vocabulary. So lately I've been taking long walks and narrating the scenery or telling a story to an imaginary audience.  You know those crazy people you see on the streets talking to themselves?  Maybe they aren't crazy but are mearly German students or they are crazy because they are German students. So next time you see me, if I'm muttering incomprehesibly, know that I'm just trying to get to a 3.