Studying in German !
I mostly came to Graz to improve my German. As it is now almost the end of the winter semester, I decided to assess my German skills.
I am taking culture and language classes along with economics and business administration courses. Although I really enjoy learning economics, I must say that my interest has been lately overtaken by a feeling of frustration. Most of the time, I am the only ERASMUS student in my economics classes, which basically means I am the only one not really understanding the whole class. I have a teacher who really seems funny, but I can not decide whether I find him funny or not because I actually never understand his jokes. He must be thinking French people are really hard to please.
I am also kind of frustrated because I need to spend three times as long than the others native-german speakers to memorize the knowledge. Unlike the Austrians, I need to understand the specific vocabulary before I can even start to understand the sentence and then the principle. Sometimes, although I know what we are talking about, I can only remember it in French or in English and can not easily express it in German. For example I took a test in Applied Business Administration that contained some multiple-choice questions. The thing is that the questions were using a complete different vocabulary than the one used in the powerpoint of the teacher. As a result, even though I had studied a lot, it was really hard to give a relevant answer.
Most of the time I have to study on my own and not from my notes as I can not benefit from the explanations of the teacher because he is talking too fast for me. The fact that I can memorize things quicker in French or in English also increases that feeling of frustration : my memory in German is unfortunately not that efficient ! I have sometimes asked for notes from other students but then they do not offer to send them again for the next class so I did not want to insist too much and did not ask anymore.
However I do not wish to end up this article sounding pessimistic, I have came up with some solutions for the second semester. Firstly I have found one economic course aimed at ERASMUS students. Then I will try to choose more class contact times rather than lectures where I usually have less opportunities to ask questions directly to the teacher. I also hope the intensive German course in February will help me get back on my feet and make me feel more at ease with German. I will also take part in the Tandem Program. This program aims at helping people practice their foreign languages. They will give me the phone number of a native German speaker who wants to speak French and German with me. In the meantime I really hope I will pass the classes I have taken this semester because I worked so hard on it. My grades are unfortunately not representative of the amount of hours I spent working. I need to accept that it takes more time for me to learn than in France and therefore I need to spend more time on it.
I really hope that this plan for the second semester is going to work ! In the meantime I will try to do my best on the upcoming exams in German (and of course on PC3 as well !)
