Saturday, August 23, 2008

language course and blog absences

Every weekday, I take a language course at the university. I really love my language course. From day 1, we spoke only German in class, which forces me to think in German. At the beginning of the course last week, I spent a lot of time thinking of a sentence in English and then translating to German. Now, however, I think of the question in German, albeit it very grammatically incorrect German. However, its improvement. Last week, I understood about 30% of what my instructor said. Now, I understand about 80% and I sometimes can even understand his jokes (something I ussually can't even do in English).

All this German learning is quite taxing on the brain. Class starts at 8:45am every morning. However, I have to leave my apartment by 8:15am in order to arrive in time (those of you who know me can guess how rarely this happens). I typically wake up around 7am, shower, then do chemistry research (I'm still on stipend in the US so I have to work on chemistry as well), catch up on email, then take off for German class, ussually rushing out the door around 8:35 or 8:40am. I think speak and think in German for 4 hours, take a lunch break, then return to study German or German culture (in English) from 2-4pm. Even if I'm able to return home immeadiately, I ussually don't arrive again until 5pm. (the trek to the class is downhill while the trek away from class is uphill so it takes longer to get home). Ussually though, I have to run errands in town so I don't return home until 6 or 7pm. By that time, I'm ussually too exhausted to think about dinner (hence why I don't really eat dinner any more). And even less likely to write blog posts or chemistry scripts. So I'm not trying to ignore you, I'm really just too tired to think about anything in English or German.

I'm going to try to do better. Now that I'm in a schedule, I hope to get more work done next week. I still have German homework and Chemistry scripts to write so I'll be on the computer more today. Feel free to im or call me if you have the time. I'd love to hear from you. (you can leave posts on the blog as well).

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