German Meetup!

Tonight I ended my solitary German journey by attending a German conversation club meetup night. It was quite the learning experience!

Basically since my flop of learning via the Goethe Institut online course, I've just been casually keeping up with my Duolingo things. It was hard to prioritise because I had no one to practice with, and there were no USYD community classes happening (still none happening!). Desperate me tried to see if I could do a Goethe class in-person as I'm fairly underloaded for uni at the moment, but besides the cost being a deterrent the classes for this half of the year had already begun and no more are set to start until next year.

I guess I was starting to feel the pressure of becoming fluent in a language under a time limit and felt that it was time to try something radical.

I was actually inspired by my recent trip to The Netherlands, where in some parts and some tourist attractions, tours and signage were done in Dutch, as well as evidently their most common tourist language: German. I actually paid to go into a museum that turned out to be only in these two languages so I spent ages in there trying to decode the German (and the Dutch, which when sounded out is a bit like strange German) descriptions of all the items. War history was admittedly a pretty steep start to translation practice, but I think it reconvinced me of the worth of knowing multiple languages - Europeans put us English-speakers to shame with their tri-or-more-lingual natures!

When I got back home I was Duolingo-ing in earnest but I found myself googling conversation clubs, and this one turned up! I will admit that I was drawn in by the apfelstrudel (it comes with ice cream!!!).

The meetup info page. Trusty Google knew that food would draw me in.

Tonight it was a small gathering of five including myself and my boyfriend (who graciously agreed to accompany me - also was drawn in by the food), though one of the others told us a few months back there had been 20 people at one meetup! I realised very quickly that the others were near-fluent speakers and it seemed that at least 1 if not 2 of these people actually were native speakers! And the other person seemed to have lived in Germany for an extended period of time. A couple of times I had to ask sentences or words to be repeated but I was actually surprised at how much conversation I was able to follow and contribute to. We mainly talked about ourselves and what we did for work/study, and as the other people already knew each other so it became a bit of a question-answer format. I really enjoyed that I was able to express myself within the context of an actual person wanting to know things about me, so I felt motivated to try crazy half-formed sentences because I knew I could say part of it and then ask how to say the rest. It was an incredibly quick way to learn vocabulary, and to learn to phrase things more naturally. This is in contrast to Duolingo, where it's just google-translating phrases back and forth with correct grammar being at the forefront of learning. Here are a couple things I learned today:

The word for "white" and the I-conjugation for "know" is the same: weiss

Das ist bescheuert - German equivalent of "that sucks"

The word for "diarrhoea" and the past tense verb for "fail" are easy to get mixed up: durchfall and durchfallen respectively