The most productive week of my German life

I haven’t done ANY traveling lately (staying in Tübingen has been amazing and totally necessary in that I’ve been writing a Hausarbeit, term paper, and trying to study for exams). I have therefore been unusually productive lately, and thus last week is a great week to highlight how I spend my time here without seeming like a total lazy bum.

Monday: American history at 10am, salad for lunch at the Mensa (student cafeteria), library to jump on the computers and print stuff out, Poverty class at 4pm, home for dinner, back to the library to do some reading, bed. Note: Monday nights are NOT normally spent at the library, but rather at “Tangente” a wonderfully sketchy bar that has karaoke on Monday nights.

Tuesday: Schnitzler class at 10 am, kinda boring, home for lunch, read for my next class, go to the American history sub-section-type-thing, go home, dinner. Not terribly productive.

Wednesday: Wake up, write an intro for my Hausarbeit, meet some other Americans at a café, pound out quite a few more pages, type up notes for two of my exams that I’ll take a week from Monday, dinner and bed. Note: Wednesday nights are also normally spent going out somewhere, sometimes to Tübingens really big club “Top 10.”

Thursday: Wake up late, read a bit for class, go to “Dorfgeschichten” at noon, have some lunch and answer emails, go to Pronunciation Training at 3, meet some people at a café to do work after class, write a few more pages. Have delicious falafel for dinner, do a bit more writing in the library, and then go “Würfel unser Cocktails!” (order a cocktail, roll a dice, how much you roll is how much you pay) at Schöne Aussichten.

Friday: Wake up late, go to the Bürgeramt (Citizens Office?) to un-register from the city (sadness!!!) go to a café and continue the mad writing spree, finish my paper, (WIN, its over 4500 words auf Deutsch), buy some wine, and have a girls-night on the balcony/porch/thing at my apartment.

Saturday: Wake up not too late, go to the library, start revising my paper, have lunch, continue revising, sort-of finish revising, go to a café for some much-needed caffeine, go home and have dinner, then meet some Germans at Tübingens little Bier-garten on the river, and speak lots of German.

Sunday: Wake up late, finish revising the paper/adding some secondary literature, church at 6:30pm, home to dinner and bed.

The week of work really paid off, as I was able to turn in my Hausarbeit this past Tuesday! After my roommate corrected it for me on Monday night – it took her two hours and she had a rather confused/extremely concentrated look on her face the whole time. Hope my professor doesn’t fail me for my crap academic written German...I also went to my last class Thursday (sooo happy that Uni is over) and have just two mündliche Prüfungen (oral exams) next week before I'm done!

Universität

Now that the semester is basically over (I have two weeks of classes left), I’ll let you know what’s going on: school is really, really, really hard. I had no idea how very rudimentary (and honestly, quite crappy) my German was until I got stuck in a less-than-acoustically-wonderful classroom with a German speaking professor and twenty rapid-speaking (and sometimes also heavily accented or dialect-speaking) students. Wayyyyy harder than I anticipated it would be! All semester I anticipated it would eventually get better; sadly, I haven’t noticed a huge change.

For those of you who are interested, here are the classes I’m taking:

1. Arthur Schnitzler in the Context of Viennese Modernism. I freaking adore Schnitzler, so I love reading for this class, but usually get pretty lost during the discussions…it’s frustrating.

2. History of the US in the 20^th Century. This class is great because 1. I’m relearning American history, which is just life-good, and 2. It’s a total confidence-builder for my German. Since I usually have a good idea of what’s going on, since I’ve obviously learned US History before, I can really focus on the German, picking up new vocab and expressions, while at the same time definitely learning some new things. This is a lecture course, but two other “Amis” and I are taking the accompanying discussion section, where the prof loves to ask us stuff as native speakers and real-live-Americans (example: “What holds your country together as a nation?”). We never have a good answer and I’m pretty sure the other German students think we’re absolute morons.

3. Poverty in the 19^th and 20^th Century. Also a lecture, which means all listening and no stress of having to speak. I like this class, because I think the topic is interesting, and the professor speaks pretty quickly, so it’s a good challenge to my German. I don’t like this class because the professor is also really funny, making me feel totally out of the loop and non-German speaking – the reason is know he’s funny is not because I get his jokes/funny comments, but because the class erupts in laughter approximately every 15 minutes.

4. Mass-media and advertising in Germany. This class is not a real-University class, but one offered by the “German as a Foreign Language Department.” This basically means low-stress because everyone speaks the same broken German I do! While the material/readings are interesting, the class is a total joke – we don’t really “learn” anything or do much critical analysis, we just talk about how much and what kind of TV we watch. It was extremely frustrating because I’d had high expectations for it, but over already…hopefully I passed the Klausur (end-of-semester-exam).

5. Village-stories from the German speaking-area (terrible translation, sorry). I’m more auditing this class than taking it, because I think it’s interesting and like the stories, but can never finish the reading and didn’t think I was in shape to write a final paper for it. Might not get a thing from WashU for it, but it’s good to get more time each week reading and listening to German I figure, even though it makes me feel like I’m drowning sometimes.

6. Pronunciation training! Another class I’ll get no credit for but totally life-useful. While 14 one-hour classes certainly aren’t going to get rid of my horrible American accent, I’m hoping it will help a little, and it’s nice to actually learn some rules for pronunciation outside of the basic stuff you get in year-1 German. I’ve already learned quite a lot actually.

So that’s class. It’s hard, totally different from the American system, and demoralizing…luckily lots of other parts of this semester abroad have been wonderful! Since Uni turned out to be an Enttäuschung (dissapointment).