der Klaus, Angela and the land of SCHOOLSUPPLIES

One of my big unknowns coming to Germany for the summer was my classes. I knew next to nothing about the Heidelberger Pädagogium beyond how to register. I knew from the website (there was an English translation, thank goodness) that it was quite simply a language school and nothing else, and it offered courses year round in a bunch of different languages. I signed up for the “Intensive Summer German” series. That basically means you can begin attending when you want and stop attending when you want, but while you’re there you’re committed to be in class from 8:50 till 12:15 noon each day. The school is surprisingly inexpensive to attend and also surprisingly well-established; the people who work there have been working for years.

Although not near the University, the location is perfect. Robert initially assumed that it was in Neuenheimer Feld, which is where all the fancy, rather cold, and overly air-conditioned (according to Anna) science buildings are from the University of Heidelberg. LUCKILY, he was wrong – the address on the website led us to the “Stadtteil” (or district, sort of) of Neuenheim, a few blocks away from where I lived last year. This is a rather wealthy and beautiful residential part of town, just on the other side of the Neckar (the big river that flows through Heidelberg). Since it is a fifteen minute walk from the altstadt, there are much fewer tourists, making me feel the slightest bit more attached to my surroundings.

The disadvantage is that there are bakeries and patisseries on just about every corner! The two Euro croissants before class each day (not that I’m ever there early enough to have time) are making it reaaaaaally hard to stay within my budget… AND, oh my goodness, SCHOOLSUPPLIES. People say many things about Germany, but what is all too infrequently mentioned is that Germany is, among other things, the land of UNBELIEVABLE SCHOOL SUPPLIES. Morgan, you would go insane here for all of the incredibly useless and yet so amazing array of every color pen of every width tip. I myself went today looking for index cards, thinking this would be an easy task. I went into one store on the corner of a beautiful marketplace and found, to my pleasant astonishment, index cards of all sizes and all colors, stacked neatly in its very own section of the little shop. I settled for tiny (4x6 cm) yellow index cards to write new vocabulary on. MORGAN, where were you to enjoy this moment with me?!? You would certainly love it here…

Neuenheim is almost as lovely as Der Klaus. I am very sad to say that he was only my teacher for one week. After a placement test I was placed in “Sachsen”, an advanced-intermediate class. To my dismay the classroom #48 is on the 5^th floor, meaning lots of steps in between coffee breaks and blistering heat in the noon-time sun. However, great people, and good conversation. The language classes here are so different from at school: we read Goethe, and they expect us to know all the vocab the first time we see it, a sort of “well, we assigned it to you, so you should know it” attitude. There’s just not enough time to internalize the language. Sure, we can read Zweig and we can try our best to write an essay about it, but when it comes to trying not to make a fool out of myself while trying to get a cell phone plan I am pretty much lost. That is what this class is about – discussing vocab, reviewing old grammar (as opposed to learning new grammar), and talking about so-called “German culture”.

My classmates are Merve (Turkey), Ishalai (Turkey), Mika (Japan), Lura (Ukraine), and Li-An (Taiwan). The best part is that they all have such different backgrounds; talking about cultural differences in each place dominates each conversation. One main question is population size – everybody seems to compare cities based on amount of people who live there. It makes a lot of sense, I guess, and I’ve found myself doing the same. Der Klaus asked me often to describe Boston and various preconceptions he has of Americans in general. I’ve found his preconceptions really fun – for instance, we talked about riding bicycles, and he jokingly said that if you’d plant a German in a city, like New York for instance, they’d try to bike all winter even at rush hour. I replied that I knew German graduate students that do exactly that in Chicago. He has a lot of ideas about the US but does not want to visit. He has no interest, since as he said everything in between Boston and San Francisco is overflowing with evangelicals. What did he call it? Bush-country. It’s often difficult to make sure that we don’t speak any English during class. It is THE default when people cannot understand German explanations of a vocab word, let’s say. So then Klaus says it in English and everybody, the Turkish girls and the Japanese and the Taiwanese know exactly what he’s talking about. It’s like a teaching helper for other languages. And yet our course isn’t based off of English, like my courses in Chicago were. No two translation dictionaries are alike in our class.

New teacher today: Angela Retzlaff. The great thing about der Klaus was that he spoke in a naturally slow and even tone, so that we could understand most of what he said. Angela, on the other hand, expressly tries to speak slower so that we can understand. The difference is that with Klaus I didn’t feel like the foreigner; with Angela I feel a bit condescended to. This was only day one. Now I have many index cards to fill out and much vocab to go over… too much detail in these last entries?? Alas, I apologize.