Intensive German, week 1.

Now I'm not one to back down from a challenge, but this one has got me straining. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one!

I showed up for my first class prepared-- textbook ($80 discounted from $100, damn the publishers), big fat dictionary, which I feel like I should name because it takes up as much space as another person on the couch when I am studying, and 7 different colored pens, for reasons that were explained on day one.

Now the guy who teaches it is a seasoned professor of German literature and culture, and teaches this course to bring people from 0 to reading and translating Nietzche... in 6 weeks. So yes, to repeat, intensive.

The class was made up mostly of people from my department and some from the classics department, since we need to be able to read academic German for what we're doing. Presumably. In my case I know it'll come in handy since many early psychiatric textbooks, and of course the writings of the father of the field, are in German. The classicists are an interesting bunch. Remember their work is to learn dead languages and specialize in literature that was written thousands of years ago. Blows my mind.

First class, we do a little parsing. Now I don't know how long it's been since the last time you mapped a sentence, but I am not used to thinking about them in this way... find the conjugated verb, the predicate adjectives, the adverbs, and conjunctions, the accusative objects, and identify the nominative, accusative, dative or genetive cases of whatever we're looking at. IN GERMAN, mind you. Ugh. I hated it in high school, and age hasn't softened me up to it any.

There were a few students who were calling them out with no problem. Needless to say, I found this a little intimidating. That is, until I figured out-- it was the frigging classicists! I guess when you learn a few languages this way you learn to throw words like that around with ease.

We're reading, learning grammar, translating sentences, and memorizing vocab. Unlike most of the graduate teachers I have had, this guy gives quizzes. The first was a vocab quiz. I did fine. The second was a translation quiz. I bombed this. Let's take a look at why. This was the sentence in German:

Es gibt keinen Staatsbeamten, der den Studenten eines Professoren versprach, dass ihnen ihr Lehrer immer zum geeignetesten Beruf rät.

Ok. The reason I bombed the quiz? Because I spent the entire time thinking that this couldn't possibly translate into what I thought it said. The correct translation is:

There is no civil servant who promised to the student of a professor that their teacher always advises them to (pursue) the most suitable career.

?!?

Then the workload. When he said 3-6 hours a night, he wasn't kidding. Someone spoke up at the end of the week and said it was unsustainable and overwhelming (yay) and he admitted that the summer term had been shortened to six weeks from seven. The prof also figured out that the classicists had an edge on the rest of us and is going a bit slower with the parsing. Anyway now the workload is saner, but I'm a little burned out! Hooray for long weekends...