Das zweite Mal: German meetup

Round 2 was pretty exciting!

I was definitely more nervous going on my own because the first time, everyone except me and David were pretty much fluent speakers. So I was a bit worried that without him, I would be the one slowing the conversation down when everyone else just really wanted to get on with their conversations auf Deutsch.

This time the group was a little bigger, with 9 in total instead of 4. I think having more people actually made it feel less scary because you could kind of pick your conversation partner(s) and just go and if you really wanted to keep talking to someone else in German they’d kind of just find each other and go off on their own tangent. Tonight there was a bit more of a mix of people - I met a French guy who lived and worked in Germany for a number of years, a New Zealander who basically did a single 3 month intensive with questionable pronunciation, and a Dutch guy who knows German because Dutch people are magical (tbh, I didn’t ask him why he was there). There was also a guy my age who seemed to be the German equivalent of the Japanese “weeabu”(?) phenomenon - he just watched a whole lot of German media and therefore knew random but specific German facts and say complex but unhelpful phrases (tonight he quoted lyrics, movies and Alexa-the-home-AI) but he could barely understand my snail’s-pace German!

There were also the two native speakers from last time that once again proved a very useful resource for us all!

One thing I found particularly valuable about tonight was that I had to introduce and talk about myself about 5 times, so I was able to refine the way I went about doing it - both in terms of words/grammar and fluency/pronunciation - without boring the one conversation partner. I expect every time I go to this meetup, I will get to revise and refine these common topics related to myself. A really natural way to pick things up I guess!

Having so many countries represented at the table also meant we talked a lot about travelling, so I learnt a bit more about how people talk about different modes of transport:

You can FLY to a place (geflogen), DRIVE to a place (gefahren), WALK (as in specifically walk) to a place (gelauft), and go BY FOOT to a place (gegangen).

Also, you can TRAVEL around a place on a trip (gereist), and you can VISIT someone in a place (besucht) and you can STAY in a place (geblieben).

Having the less fluent speakers there also meant I had more processing time to understand what they were saying, and it was even better when one of the native speakers joined our conversation as then we got to learn vocab that I wanted and the other guy wanted, which were often not things I would think about learning or saying. In this way two of us got to listen to NZ dude’s long and complex story about how he met his German girlfriend - they met in Vietnam, travelled for 2 months together, then he went to Poland and she went to Lithuania to meet with her parents, then he also went to Lithuania to meet her parents, then he went to Norway and other places, then met her in Germany where he did his 3 month course, then he went to Hong Kong for 4 days to see his dad, then he met back up with her in Germany for 4 days and went to Jordan and other places for 2 weeks, then he went to Brisbane…. then we switched to English because that took so long for him to explain and we were all tired!

The list of amusing words grows. Tonight's favourite is definitely etepetete!