Welche Sprachen sprichst du? Ich spreche Englisch, ein bisschen Spanisch, und ein bisschen Deutsch.

On Monday I started my language class at Babylonia. It has been pretty awesome so far...quite different obviously than my German classes at City College in SF. Of course, we are all immersed in the German language here and it is an intensive class that meets 4 days a week (Monday through Thursday) from 10am to 1:30pm...so that in and of itself makes a difference. But this class is also awesome for the wide range of people that are in there and the fact that everyone's first language is not English...so you are forced to speak German a lot more because it will be your common language.

We have two teachers for the class. One teaches Monday and Tuesday, and one teaches Wednesday and Thursday. The first is a male teacher and the second female. About a third of the class speaks English as their first language (from the US [SS and I and one other...although SS always says that she is from California, 'which is its own country', actually...all three of us are from CA, although me just immediately, SS from LA and the other person from Berkeley although she has been the living the last 5 years in Chicago], Australia, New Zealand, and England...but I think everyone speaks a little English) and about half speaks Spanish as their first (or second) language (mostly from Argentina and some from Portugal). There are also people from Belize, France, Italy, Israel, Palestine, Bulgaria, and Bosnia. So today, for example, our teacher spoke mostly in German, but also in English and Spanish. Since Spanish was the foreign language that I took all through school this is interesting to me also. A lot of the people in the class speak 3-4 languages, and one girl speaks like 6 (not including German).

Needless to say, everyday has been a very intense but extremely engaging and insightful experience. Because we are all actually in Germany, there is a lot more conversation about what people actually say versus the proper way to say it...and a lot more emphasis on extremely practical terms. For example, I know all this about everyone because we have spent the first 3 days asking each other in German; 'What is your name?', 'Where do you come from?', 'How long have you been in Berlin?', etc. We also learned how to say important things like, "I am (trained as) an artist but have no job."...a situation I shared with a few other people...but there was also people trained as a Lab Technician, a Yoga Instructor, an Engineer, and a Dentist.

Also, there are things that everyone just knows from being here, even if they have never had a German class before, like numbers. Numbers are also especially easy in German. If you can count to 20 you can pretty much say any other larger number in German because it is just a super long compound word. In English you write 52 like fifty-two, but in German it is zweiundfünfzig. 152 is einhundertzweiundfünfzig, 1256 is eintausendzweihundertsechsundfünfzig, etc. It's kinda fun.

Today I went and picked up my text book from the book store and also bought 'Der Hobbit' in German, on CD. I had looked for this before we left the states but it was too expensive there. This should be entertaining and educational...I know the story well...yet it is long and involved so it shouldn't get boring too quickly to listen to more than a few times.