The School Experience (German)

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Product:	German
Date:	02/12/03 (14 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A useful asset, Similar enough to pick up quickly

Disadvantages: Very demanding, Needs to be taught well

To learn another language, a second tongue, is a goal of many people however once you begin you start to realise just how complex this is. The study of German is a much simpler affair for English people than an unrelated language such as Japanese or American - ha ha, little joke there, I don't know what I mean - but once you start getting assessed on the matter it becomes something of a burden to get it all in the head.

I've been learning German for over six years now in secondary school, although to be fair two of these years were basically wasted doing crosswords and watching stupid computer-animated videos of people buying Bon Jovi CDs, and was all summed up in three lessons when GCSEs began. GCSE level required the pupil to be fluent to a degree, to use complicated sentences- using "weil" to mean "because" is always a good one because it sends the verb to the end and you can look a bit more clever- as well as proper use of the past tenses, that's perfect and imperfect, and the present.

This may seem a little heavy-going but my school had great teachers and besides, there were two years to cover it all in over four lessons a week. The most embarrassing part of GCSE was that the student was required to record a tape of German at home which would be assessed by some examiner somewhere, although the final exams were the usual writing; reading & listening; and speaking, a conversation with the teacher in a deceptively homely room. The easiest part of the course was certainly the coursework which only needed to be very brief and could be cross-examined aplenty, and I was very satisfied when I came out with an A grade at the end of GCSEs- my teacher later told me that I was only one point off an A star but that's alright because I wasn't one of those kids who got money for their A stars anyway.

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After a lot of thinking, I decided to carry German on to A-level, and after the AS year I'm currently studying it for A2. The course is a lot harder:

For a start, one of the best German teachers has left, leaving only the lady, what is good, and the other man, what is rubbish. This also makes the lessons much more of a chore to go to on Monday afternoons and Wednesday mornings, especially as the majority of the four-person class decides that an hour of drinking at home is preferable to an hour in the fittingly-dark and depressing Deutsch room.

Before I lose too much perspective, the A-level course is considerably harder than the GCSE one and this time that's actually true. Along with the existing tenses, new ones suddenly spring up all over the place and there are an increasing number of conjunctions, pronouns, verbs and everything else that suddenly make it very hard to write anything down at all. My mind hasn't been on the lesson completely for the last couple of months, mainly because of the change in teacher, and as such it's very hard to try and get all of this new German into my head. I have two re-sits in January, as I only achieved a C grade at AS-level but was close to a B, and am going to have to have a very German Christmas if I plan to succeed! And I'll have to spend time talking to the scary and smelly German assistant. That isn't a racial stereotype by any means.

I would recommend study of another language to anyone who's interested, but if you expect to become fluent then it is a LOT of work, probably more than you'd expect. German is a good choice as, although it's not very widely spoken outside Deutschland, most words and phrases are similar enough to ease the burden a little. I can't really offer any starting phrases or words both because I have some German coursework to get on with, and it's early in the morning for all that stuff! It would be great to be fluent in a numb
er of languages, and I've heard that a lot of jobs can pay up to £10,000 more per year to someone fluent in a foreign language, however the workload suddenly seems very strenuous, or "schwierig," once you open your book at home and there's no one explaining it to you. Oh yes, and it's very satisfying when you feel you've begun to master certain aspects; something that happens far less frequently now there's the sentence sructure to follow. I'm sure I never used to use that and got awarded A's, makes you wonder whether it's the "real truth" I'm learning now.

The school, and obviously a large number of others across the country, has offered annual visits to Germany which are becoming more insane in prices all the time- £180 when I was in Year 7 and now around £300, but I managed to get a free ride last year as one of two Sixth Form 'assistants' on the Year 7 trip to Aachen, a nice place in Germany that I would recommend a large number of times over the depressing and grey Koblenz where we had stayed on previous excursions.

Now I'd better get back to that German coursework...

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