German Lesson

We just finished our very first German lesson with our private teacher Martin. He came to our hotel tonight, and starting next week he will come to our apartment one night a week for about an hour and a half. Tonight we selected the textbook that we would like to use and he went over some basic stuff like how to introduce ourselves and ask someone else what their name is. We also practiced asking each other our first and last name, including how to spell them, our address, city and phone number. We also did it up like first graders and learned the alphabet and how to count! Woo hoo! We are at a very basic level, but it is better to specifically focus on learning the language rather than getting by asking for people to speak English with us.

Martin said that in addition to having class at home, we can also go out into the community for lessons to learn vocabulary and phrases for certain locations such as the supermarket, a restaurant, the post office etc. I think that would be great for us because it is hard to sit and just learn from a book, but when you are in an actual situation it makes more sense and I bet it would "stick" more. That would also help us expose ourselves to more of the culture with a "cultural broker" to explain certain aspects to us.

I think German is going to be a lot harder to learn than Spanish, but we are excited to get started and to hopefully start understanding some more of the words being spoken. It would at least be nice to understand when the cashier says the total amount we owe instead of having to steal a glance at the cash register to see the number!

Also, despite the warnings from other Americans that it is absolutely impossible to get good Mexican food here, I made some pretty good tacos for dinner. The ingredients are not the same, but the taco seasoning worked well enough and despite not having an oven to heat up the taco shells, I would say that it was a success. I made some rice with beans and peppers too (had to be prepared in case the tacos were a bust), but everything came out good. The best part was John helped me with the dishes after dinner--that makes two times this week!