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As this semester comes to an end, I want this final piece of reflection to not just focus on a specific issue, like the previous ones did, but to be about what helped my learning in general, and what I would like to take away from this semester and carry it over to the next one. I feel that having a language partner who is a native speaker of German was perhaps one of the most important ways for me to consolidate my learning. This is something that I found very beneficial and I would like to continue doing that in the second semester as well. An extra bonus of having a language partner is that I felt that I was able to learn some things about Germany's culture as well, whilst talking to him! When it comes to matters of vocabulary, except for practicing with my language partner, I found that the list of words at the end of the book was also very useful, and quite user-friendly (as it always included the gender of the words and the plural forms in a straightforward format). I also found it helpful to keep a list of new words that I learned in every chapter. Finally, YouTube videos were also useful for vocabulary learning. When reflecting on grammar learning, I believe I benefited a lot from doing the grammar exercises of the book, but also various quizzes and games online. Integrating quizzes and games to the learning process is a very good strategy, I think, as it makes learning fun for me, thereby helping me retain more information.  In terms of speaking and listening, again, I feel that having a language partner really helped. The labs were also very helpful in this respect, as we did a lot of practical speaking and listening exercises. This semester was not an easy one. I struggled to retain all this new information that we learned as beginners in German. But, as this semester ends, it is like all the pieces of this puzzle come together. I found that, after briefly revising all the chapters of the book, I am now more able to combine information from all of them and, for example, form more complex sentences, or understand more things in a written text. Bearing all that in mind, for me,  when learning a new language it is important to: practice it (ideally with a language partner),  find innovative and fun ways to study it (videos, games, quizzes, even creating visual memory-aids), revise it and try to draw parallels between various pieces of information, for a more holistic understanding.

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After reaching a point where we have learned both the personal pronouns and the possessive articles in class, I feel my knowledge has advanced, but I also feel quite confused at times. In fact, strangely enough, I many times catch myself being confused with the Akkusativ of the personal pronouns er (ihn-"him") and sie (sie-"her"), and with the possessive articles sein ("his") and ihr ("her"). More specifically,  the possessive article "her", i.e. ihr, greatly reminds me of the accusative case for er, thus ihn. Not to mention the personal pronoun ihr, as in "you" plural.  It seems to me that the etymological roots of all these are so similar that they can be easily confused. So, if I have in mind that the accusative case for the personal pronoun er is ihn, I would often be confused and say that the personal article "his" is ihr, whereas ihr is actually the possessive article for females ("her").  The same goes for the accusative case for the personal pronoun "her", i.e. sie, which would make me inclined to think that the possessive article for females is sein, whereas it is ihr. I think this confusion is because the possessive article ihr ("her") is very similar to ihn, which is the accusative case for the masculine personal pronoun. So, I would ask myself, how can these seemingly similar etymological roots (ihr-hers, ihn-him) refer to both masculine and feminine genders? So, ihr and ihn were very confusing to me in the beginning. They still are, to some extent. Therefore, I decided to create a table (a picture of which I have attached in this reflection) to aid my memory for both the personal pronouns (in Nominativ and Akkusativ) and the possessive articles (in maskulin, feminin, neutrum, both singlular and plural, including the Akkusativ for maskulin). I found that putting all these together on a table helped a lot, because I was able to visualize these grammatical points. I am frequently using this table as a memory-aid, and hopefully soon I will not be needing it at all. I also found that it helped me a lot to color-code, as seen in the picture below, for a better visualization.

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In order for me to remember the ordinal numbers, I did a little speaking exercise with my German friend. I know when his birthday is, but I kept making wrong guesses in order to practice the ordinal numbers. So, for example, I would ask him: Hast du deinen Geburstag am ersten Dritten? Then he would say no, and I would ask again until I got it right. Also, I told him when each member of my family has their birthday. That way, not only did I practice ordinal numbers, but also vocabulary about families. Then, I also asked him when the members of his family have their birthdays. After that, I took this opportunity to further ask how he and his family celebrate birthdays (wie feierst du deinen Geburstag?/ Wie feirt dein Bruder seinen Geburstag? etc.), and I also told him how my family and I do it! I believe this particular practice session that I had with my German friend was one of the most useful ones, as it combined many aspects of German language learning. I find it that, as the semester is coming to an end, it is really beneficial for me to be able to draw parallels and connections between different things that we have learned in class since the start of the module. Having a discussion in German about birthdays and celebrations really helped me to practice and remember ordinal numbers, vocabulary about families, vocabulary about celebrations, and even grammatical aspects, like the Akkusativ, and the possessive articles (Wann hast du deinen Geburstag?).

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Learning to tell the time in German was very interesting but also particularly challenging for me. I guess this is a general difficulty that I have, because I find it hard to tell the time in every language that I learn. But, with German, this was more challenging, because there were some new words involved (viertel, Stunde, kurz nach, kurz vor etc). The hardest part for me was that, for example, when a German says halb acht, they actually mean it is 7:30, even though the literal translation is half eight. This was, and still is, very confusing to me. I thought about this and I realized that one way to remember this is to think that halb acht means 30 minutes to eight, hence why the word "halb" ("half") goes before the word acht ("eight"), instead of acht halb, which could be the equivalent of eight thirty. So, it is not eight thirty (acht halb), it's rather thirty to eight (halb acht). This little trick helped me a lot and I can say that I now feel more confident about telling the time in German. When it comes to months, initially I though it was really convenient that months in German are very similar to months in English (Januar, Februar, März, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Okrober, November, Dezember). However, this turned out to be confusing at times, precisely because of this similarity. I spoke to my German friend about this, with whom I regularly try to practice my German, and he sent my a YouTube link to a children's song about months. The melody of this song has since then stuck with me and I found that it helped me a lot with remembering months in German, without confusing them with months in English. The YouTube video with the song can be found in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ0uJo5kJ04.

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In the beginning of this semester, I can already say that an aspect of German that I find challenging is proper pronunciation and application of small, everyday dialogues that we learn in class in practical situations. For this reason, I came up with the idea to practice these short dialogues with a German friend who is, of course, a native speaker. I asked him to meet so I could practice my German, and we had a short discussion about issues such as what our names are, where we come from etc. This really helped me both with practicing these dialogues in a real-life situation, but, more importantly, with practicing my listening and pronunciation skills, as I was talking to a native speaker. This was similar to a listening exercise, only more interactive and it really helped me! I plan to continue practicing with my friend throughout this semester.

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Being able to come up with the proper plural form of German nouns can be quite the challenge. I found it difficult to be able to remember the plural forms of some of the words I learn in class. For this reason, I did two things: 1) I tried to combine my learning of new words (in terms of vocabulary) with simultaneously learning their plural form, and 2) I figured it would be easier for me to also do some fun quizzes to help me with plural forms. I found some on this link: https://www.funtrivia.com/trivia-quiz/World/German---Plurals-of-Some-Common-Nouns-42117.html. Therefore, whenever I have some free time, be it during breakfast, or late in the evening, I try to do some of these quizzes and I find that it helps me a lot, and in a fun way, so I do not necessarily see it as work. After I give my answer to the quiz questions, I can check my responses on the spot, because, if I get something wrong, the software tells me immediately. It also gives brief explanations of some rules regarding plural. And the good thing is that these quizzes are free of charge too!

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This week was a quite challenging one, because we learned a lot of new vocabulary on hobbies and I found it hard to remember everything. For this reason, I decided to search online to find some useful videos to help me. Whilst doing that, I came across a particularly useful one, that can be accessed via this link:  https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=german+vocabulary+about+hobbies&qs=PF&cvid=bf0db4c4e0f445e99149bfc3ae085cbc&cc=GB&setlang=en-GB&DAF0=1&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dgerman%2bvocabulary%2babout%2bhobbies%26form%3dEDGTCT%26qs%3dPF%26cvid%3dbf0db4c4e0f445e99149bfc3ae085cbc%26cc%3dGB%26setlang%3den-GB%26DAF0%3d1&view=detail&mmscn=vwrc&mid=079660C2C84DAE6549E1079660C2C84DAE6549E1&FORM=WRVORC. I found this video really helpful, because it combined vocabulary with pictures, which helped me remember the words better through visualization. What is more, the video covers many hobbies and gives viewers the time to repeat the words twice after the speaker. Therefore, what I did for this week was to go through my vocabulary notes from class, together with watching this video twice. I believe this helped me a lot with retaining a lot of words about hobbies. Another thing that helped me this week is that I practiced some short dialogues about hobbies with my German friend. This helped me become better at pronunciation and exercise my listening skills by listening to a native speaker talk about his hobbies.

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This week, except for vocabulary, I found myself struggling a lot with the articles der, die and das. I found it quite hard to remember the genders by heart every time I learned a new word. I found a very short video on YouTube giving a few tips on that matter, that I found easy to remember: words ending in –keit, -heit, -schaft and –ung are feminine, words ending in –ling and –ismus are masculine and words ending in –chen or –lein are neuter. The video is available via this link: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=der+die+das+german&view=detail&mid=2466D84B4F7CA7D3D9772466D84B4F7CA7D3D977&FORM=VIRE.  I also found an online article, which was also quite useful, albeit a bit longer, containing much more information than the video: https://www.thoughtco.com/masculine-feminine-or-nueter-in-german-4068442. Both these helped me understand a bit better the genders in German language, so I intend to turn to them and use them as a reference point every time I feel confused.