German A1.2 by Mihaela Pap

ISR 1

mopap1 — 2020-03-08 15:24:48 UTC

I looked through the German courses provided by Deutsche Welle and started watching "Nicos Weg". I find it helpful to see how people interact on a day-to-day basis and what vocabulary they use. The videos also cover a good part of the vocabulary used in class and that way they reinforce it. I decided to do a placement test on the Deutsche Welle website out of curiosity. I stumbeld upon some new words like: Anfängerstufe, Mittelstufe and Abschlussstufe.

ISR 2

mopap1 — 2020-03-12 11:41:35 UTC

Following a class discussion, I looked more into the process of moving house in Germany. I found a list of common abbreviations like: AB – Altbau (old building erected before 1945), EBK – Einbauküche (built-in kitchen), KM – Kaltmiete (net rent), NK – Nebenkosten (utility costs) which I think are really useful. Also ' apartments come with no furniture, carpeting or household appliances and sometimes even without a kitchen' https://www.internations.org/go/moving-to-germany/housing.

ISR 3

mopap1 — 2020-04-05 16:56:45 UTC

I started watching a couple of TV series with german subtitles to improve my vocabulary. I found it enabled me to better engage with the content I was watching and also put the words I was reading into a specific context. This aids me to absorb more information and remember the vocabulary more easily. It also helps me to stay into a routine of studying even when I don't feel like doing it ;-).

ISR 4

mopap1 — 2020-04-23 15:27:43 UTC

I listened the story of Goldilocks on https://www.thegermanproject.com/stories/goldilocks. The slow pace of the storytelling made it easy to follow along and understand what was being said. I learned new words like 'Brei', '
beschweren', 'Magen", 'Kamin' and many others. I also looked more into conjunctions as I often had problems with the word order following certain conjunctions and I found out that 'aber', 'und' and 'denn' are coordinating conjunctions and therefore the verb is going to be in the second position after them.

ISR 5

mopap1 — 2020-04-24 21:27:27 UTC

I had a look on https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zm3m47h/articles/zrrfmfr to study the perfect tense in more detail. I don't find this particular tense that difficult to use as it is pretty similar to the english equivalent, although the participle form of certain verbs can be a bit complicated. I looked online for lists of the most common irregular verbs in german and I will try to focus more on memorising them.

ISR 6

mopap1 — 2020-04-25 13:01:06 UTC

I studied the vocabulary related to clothing using Quizlet. I was able to learn the terms and associated articles as well as some other words used to describe or related to clothing like 'eng', 'bequem' and 'anprobieren'. I also read an article about german fashion https://www.dw.com/en/german-fashion-is-there-more-to-german-style-than-socks-and-sandals/av-50574475 and I found it extremely interesting to see the germans' attitude to clothing and especially how different Berlin seems to be from the rest of the country.

ISR 7

mopap1 — 2020-05-13 17:03:36 UTC

I had a look online to find more information about time prepositions and found an interesting youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziPDfbS5Rlk explaining the use of ‘am’, ‘im’, ‘um’, ‘ab’ and ‘von’. It helped me discern better the differences between how time prepositions are used in German and English. I practiced how to use these prepositions on https://german.net/exercises/prepositions/time-prepositions/. I also practiced the colours in german and had a look on some german expressions involving colours like 'Das Blaue vom Himmel versprechen' and how to differentiate between different shades of the same colur using 'dunkel' or 'hell'.

ISR 8

mopap1 — 2020-05-19 00:36:00 UTC

I had a look on https://learngerman.dw.com/en/modal-verbs-d%C3%BCrfen/l-37778169/gr-38301876 to work more on the uses of the modal verb dürfen and especially on the differences between dürfen and müssen. I continued to study the vocabulary related to visiting health professionals in Germany on https://learngerman.dw.com/en/beim-arzt/l-37778169/lv and i found a couple interesting words and expressions like: 'sich etwas an|schauen', 'die Versichertenkarte', and 'das Wartezimmer'. I also read about 'gesetzliche Krankenversicherung' and how the health system works in Germany.