After three hours of German lessons at VHS they have finally taught us the following:

• Ich heiße Konstantin
• Ich komme aus Griechland
• Ich wohne in Frankfurt

That’s it

No seriously.

There were a total of 18 people in the class, of pretty much every ethnicity. Unfortunately this slowed the learning to a crawl as the teacher would make every person repeat the phrases he was teaching, and then make us tell it to each other.

The funny thing is that the teacher did not actually teach English to German but rather a German-for-all style, even though most participants were english speakers. He communicated what he meant, and what he wanted us to do, with body language mostly. This might be all well and fine when teaching you to say “Wo wohnen Sie?” but how the hell is he going to explain the more difficult meanings or the strange words? I’ll guess I’ll find out soon enough.

I probably killed the above phrase, but I meant to say “I’ve been learning”. Unfortunately I’m not advanced enough to say: “I’ve been studying German for two hours now”, mostly because I have no idea how to use the noun “Studie” in the present (Stude?)

Whatever. As I said I’ve started learning German finally. Yesterday I bought the German for Dummies book as well as the Oxford German-English pocket dictionary. Today I finally sat my lazy butt down to actually use them.

Right now what I’ve discovered is that German is like a mix between English and Greek which is amazingly fortituous since I am fluent in both languages. I can already pronounce some of the German consonants combinations that don’t exist in English (like “ch”) and also am familiar with most of the Enligh vocabulary which is quite similar to German (if you exclude words like “After” of course 🙂 ). Furthermore, the Germans use noun genders that – lucky me – almost always match the Greek relevants, so I already have a basis on when to say Der, Die or Das, although in some cases they differ, as in the “Hand” which is neutral in Greek but male in German (silly Germans, why are your hands male?).

Also, some of the grammar doesn’t make much sense if your translate it in English, but in Greek you can actually recognize how it works because of the similar ways the two languages use the present to signify future or past – as well as other similar grammatical structures.

I’ve also got Arnoc on ICQ being my personal tutor which just means that I’ll end up learning words like Steel and Panzer first of all. The rest won’t matter 😛