As usual, there's a Rammstein song for every situation...
I just found out that all the language centre staff at Goethe-Institut Sydney went home at 3pm WITHOUT SENDING OUT THE RESULTS.
Can you believe it? Why must they torture me so! That means I won't know till next Monday at the earliest. I think I'll email them next week to find out when they're planning on sending the results. Not knowing is killing me.
What if I'm waiting just to find out that I failed? That would be completely shit :-) I wouldn't mind waiting if I knew I had passed!!! Oh well. I'll just have to wait I guess. I remember being surprised when they said the results should be ready by the end of next week. Now... Ich bin enttäuscht. I'm going to go listen to the song to console myself...
One funny thing this just reminded me of actually. While I was wandering around the Goethe Institute at some stage on the day (remember, this was my first time ever in the building), I came across some posters which talked about people's German learning journeys, with regards to how they interacted with the Goethe Institute in particular. I think they were meant to be success stories but, to be honest, they struck me as examples of the complete failure of their teaching method.
The first story I read seemed reasonably typical. The first "bubble" on the journey gave the date of the guy's first class with the Goethe Institute (presumably as a teenager) where he had no knowledge of German at all. The next bubble talked about how some German people he knew were surprised to hear him speaking German to them after just a few classes. Sounds promising so far. The sequence of bubbles talked about trips to Germany for work, for classes, for extended holidays, etc, etc. The final bubble showed him happily working in a German-speaking company. I think it still mentioned him doing minor courses to help him from time to time.
The astonishing thing was the timeframe - 13 years from the first bubble till the last! Now, the last was his "very comfortable" phase, so I guess we should assume he had been fluent for quite some time. But looking back on his "bubbles", he complained about having trouble understanding people and expressing himself after something like 7 or 8 years of doing Goethe courses in and out of Germany itself, and after extended holidays and work assignments in the country itself (and by extended, I mean 3 weeks to 6 months!), in German. OK, so he could easily be setting very high goals for himself, and good on him if he is... But mein Gott is that a long time to reach some kind of comfortable fluency.
Look, I have to admit a few things here. Firsly, I may have got most of the details wrong. My memory is hardly "photographic". In fact, I'd settle for it being a magic eye puzzle most of the time. BUT, I think the general thrust of the story was as I reported - from zero to cool in 13 years, with lots of courses and time in the country in-between. I don't mind the time in the country bit, but all that expensive studying would appear not to have had much of an accelerating effect.
The second thing to admit is that my German ability is somewhere about the B2 level, maybe up towards C1 in reading, but perhaps not even at the required B2 standard in speaking (only the exam results can give me any confidence in that!). That is to say, I don't know how long it will take me to reach the same sort of level as this guy achieved, and I certainly don't mean to knock what he did.
All I'm saying is, it didn't sound to me like a really ringing endorsement for the Goethe Institute courses :-)
I haven't yet been in any Goethe Courses though, so I'm not speaking from direct experience here. Chances are, unless I find some wealthy benefactor, I'm unlikely to ever attend one either. My own German studies, in brief are:
1) A useless one or two semesters in high school. I tried to study it in year 9 but they wouldn't run the class because only 3 students wanted to do it.
2) I did one twelve week absolute beginner's night course later in high school (with my mother, of all people!). It was really poorly run, and dominated by old people who read ahead and wrote in all the answers and a older female student who could speak German FLUENTLY but said she wasn't confident. The teacher would say "does everybody understand?" and this fluent speaker would say yes, so we would move on. I did learn the phrase "ich habe meine Badehosen vergessen" which could come in handy I suppose, though I've yet to use it.
3) Fast-forward almost 20 years with no German study, and basically no exposure to it (though I did study something - I went to Alliance Francaise in the meantime), and I find myself living in Germany with my wife. We are both native English speakers, and I was working in an English-speaking company. At this time I started using Assimil's "New German with Ease" which can be twee at times, but was truly brilliant for giving me the ability to understand spoken as well as written German. I could even speak a bit, even though I didn't do much.
4) During this time my company sent my wife and I to German classes after we had been there about 3 months or even more I think. Assimil had already put me way beyond this level, and I asked to go to a higher level, but I was told that the pace was pretty quick and the next level up would be too hard. And besides, my wife didn't want to go to classes alone. What did I get out of the classes then? Not a lot, to be honest. I heard a lot of butchered German, and a lot of people (in the first one or two classes at least) who just rejected the difficulty of everything immediately. Happily, these idiots left pretty quickly. It was just like being in high school again. Except, back in high school, you were stuck with the idiots for the whole year, if not the whole six years :-) The main thing I got out of the class was some good vocab and a good friend in the form of the teacher. I still write to her occasionally and she even very generously corrected something I had written to help me prepare for the exam, which was lovely of her.
5) Pretty much as documented in this blog! About 4 or 5 months after getting back to Australia, I picked up learning German again.
The total time for all the real parts of that (steps 3 to 5) is roughly 2 years so far. When will I stop? Probably never. I know that I will change focus to other languages at some stage, but as yet I'm unsure when. This may actually be the subject of a future post, so stay tuned!
As usual, if you've got comments on any of the above, feel free to leave them below - especially if you've had experience with German courses in general, and Goethe Institute ones in particular, that you would like to share...
No comments:
Post a Comment