MENY
During my last year in high school I took a german class. I had decided to move to Berlin and found it necessary to learn the language. It´s not impossible to live here and not speak german. You can come a long way with english but it´s a good advantage when it comes to applying for jobs and getting around in the city. The german class I took was far from enough so I applied for a course at a language school called “Die DeutSCHule” where a lot of swedish people go to learn german and of course people from other nationalities to. It´s full time and the education is only in german which is kinda hard in the beginning but you get use to it. If you´re from sweden you can get CSN which covers a lot of the costs. There´s a lot of different languages schools around Berlin but I´ve choosen to focus on Die DeutSCHule because it´s the only one I´ve attended.
You can choose between morning, afternoon or evening classes. I´ve tried them all and personally prefer the morning classes because it makes me get up in the morning and gives me the rest of the day free. The classes are 3 hours long with a 15 minutes break. I personally find it a little to long and I usually lost focus at the end of every class. But I guess it´s necessary to be able to keep up with the high tempo. You learn a lot of grammar in class which is hard to learn on your own. For me who is swedish the words come pretty easily because they are so similar to swedish. But my classmates with other nationalities had a lot of struggles using the language just because they didn´t had time to learn so many words because of all the grammar. It takes time to learn words and a thing that I did was to have a separate notebook where I wrote down all the words I didn´t understand just to translate them later when I had time. They didn´t allow us to use google translate in school because it was misguiding a lot of times. But for single words I think it works really good, you can always double check laterAnother recommendation is to download the app “Doulingo”, it´s a free app where you can learn a lot of different languages.
There´s different levels when you´re studying german. It begins with A1.1 and continues to A1.2 then comes A2, then B1 and B2 and then C1 and C2. Every level in step 1 and 2. I´ve done the A2 but would really like to study more but I don´t think I´ll manage if I get in to music university. If I don´t get in I´m totally going back to german class. Attending a german class is also a great way to make new friends. Even if I´m not hanging out with anyone from my classes I still had a good time with a lot of nice people while I was there.
There´s a lot of different teachers at the school and some you´ll get along with better than others. I personally have a hard time with people telling me what to do and trying to control me. I like to take responsibility myself and choose when I want to study and not, that worked out pretty good for me so far. When you´re attending a course you only have one teacher but I´ve changed classes sometimes so I had different teachers. One of them was always checking up on everyone to make sure we were working which made me crazy. Another one was really strict which I´m not use to since I´ve been going to school in sweden. I had one favorite teacher who was so nice and encouraging which made me look forward to go to class. Which teacher you get along with is really up to you but overall it was really good education and I learned a lot.
0