Ich bin fertig!

German B1.1 course done! I’ve got 12 weeks to finish some bonus tasks since I’ve completely finished the online modules, but other than that, we had our last class this Monday.

I think it was almost lucky that social distancing happened because prior to that, I would have had to find time in my schedule to get to Bondi Junction(!) every week, which had been my hurdle trying to get this marked off. The first time I attempted an online course was in A2, where I didn’t go to the online classes AT ALL because I was nervous about speaking - and just tried to learn with only the online modules. I had to guess my way through a lot of the grammar as the modules did not give any real instruction - they were just exercises. This time I still felt a bit of that nervousness but I was definitely not at the bottom of the pack here, and knowing someone from German Speaking Club was an added bonus. The things I wanted to know that made me feel more confident with my speaking were things only native speakers would know (e.g. “Aufwachsen” is “to grow up” so you can only use it in first person otherwise you say “großziehen” which is “to raise”), so online classes quickly became very important for me. Another friend of mine from highschool also decided to start learning German (A1.1), and her enthusiasm has helped keep me keen also. We have a couple of german speaking friends from highschool (people who took it in the HSC, someone lived in Berlin for a year) so she took it upon herself to make a “Deutschsprechen” chat, so that’s been good also.

The course was technically only 10 weeks long so I’m just shy of my compulsory 3 months of training required by this section, and I’m pretty keen to continue as I feel as if I’m on the cusp of being fluent-ish. Grammar comes fairly easily to me, but it seems my retention of vocabulary is my biggest hurdle as flashcards bore me to no end… I found that writing about things for written assignments that I actually would talk about in conversation was the best way of building up meaningful and memorable vocabulary.

C1, as I had so ambitiously aimed for, seems significantly out of reach. I think I had assumed I would go through one level of language learning every half-year, thinking that each course = one level, but it seems pretty clear to me now having spent 10 weeks on the first third of B1 that the levels are a fair bit chonkier than I had thought. To reach the end of B1, which is the requirement for most German universities, I have another 20 weeks of learning to do. Wondering if we can amend this goal?