Auf den Tisch klopfen...

A few more comments on "university-life" to add:

My favorite part of my classes comes right at the end. The question is this: how is one supposed to react at the end of a student presentation? Is it appropriate to clap, or is that a bit exaggerated for a boring ten-minute talk on Goethe’s biographical background? My experience is that Americans are particularly awkward in this area. For instance people will clap for the first presentation of a class but then forget for the next three, to the disappointment of the speakers. German (and apparently the Swiss and Austrians too) have found a great solution to this conundrum. After every presentation, or if someone makes a comment and people want to show their support, the students knock on the tables with their right hand. Knocking, for a few seconds, and then either the student takes his seat again or class ends. Sometimes people knock before class is over, particularly if the professor is going on a tangent and the students want him to quickly finish his thoughts.

Robert told me about his first day of classes in Poland. During the intro lecture at his Erasmus orientation, the Germans automatically knocked on their desks at the end; all of the other students (Brazilians, Americans, French, etc.) stood aghast and had no idea what initiated this sudden table-knocking. I’m curious how long it will take me to get out of this habit once I’m back in Chicago; either that or I will try to spread it around and see if the table-knocking-instead-of-awkward-applause-method will catch on. Clapping is out; knocking is in.

As an addendum to my last entry, it is a bit contradictory to complain about the full classes and then at the same time berate the German universities for not having enough places for all of the students who apply. As Robert has commented, not every high school graduate should go to university. Only those who are qualified should be able to study in medical school, in the same way that students cannot always get accepted to the university of their choice in the US. And good alternatives to university should be taken full advantage of. But it's still a strange concept for me as an american, especially since I think of university as a right rather than a privilege. I am not quite sure how the problem of huge classes can be resolved, other than giving universities more funding to hire more professors. That would also solve the never-getting-tenure problem, now that I think of it. But who has the money for that? No $150 billion obama-style stimulus plans for Germany...

Also, I have noticed that German students use two particular words in just about every sentence: "halt" and "quazi". I keep hearing these two words popping up more and more in class. They don't really mean anything; the best translation I can think of is "sort of". Es ist halt quazi eine Behauptung für... (It is, well, sort of an argument for...) I am hesitant to equate these two words to the way we use the word "like" in the US, since people can still sound smart when using them, and they are not substitutes for "said". They are technically called Particles, or at least that is the grammar-term used for them. The word "zwar" could be tagged on to the list too... (perhaps meaning "indeed"...?) That means that I have found the key to German fluency! It lies in the correct usage of three words that mean almost, sort of, indeed absolutely nothing. 

Also etwas IST mir halt eingefallen, und zwar, dass Deutsch quazi einfach ist!