Took me quite a lot of time to get my first post done, but here I am! So, during this course I’m trying my best to get more familiar with German, and teach Finnish while doing so. Like Sebastian told in his post earlier, there’s five of us; I, Erica and Eija will teach Finnish for Sebastian and Jaimile, and Sebastian teaches German for me, Erica and Eija.
We used our first meeting on 24. of September mostly getting to know each other a bit, and to discuss about our cultures and practical issues, like the level of knowledge in the language we’d like to learn. For myself, it isn’t so important to learn grocery words and such right now (even though I’d like to gather as wide vocabulary as I can since my knowledge base in German is pretty much zero), so I’d like to focus on learning for example music- and electronics-related words I might need with school and work later on. Another thing is to basically get used to hearing German, because it’s a different thing to recognize written words than spoken.
A rather big practical thing to consider is when and where to meet, since our group is rather big, so we decided to split the group if needed, so that everyone gets a chance to have a meeting. So later on next week me, Eija and Sebastian will meet in the city centre, and a day after Erica, Jaimile and Sebastian will go to Prisma. We’ve had some ideas for future meetings as well, since there’s often something happening in Tampere, let’s see what we can come up with!
On Wednesday 1st of October, we went to café Kaffila with Eija and Sebastian, where we took the chance to learn both Finnish and German. It’s a good thing that Eija and Erica speak both Finnish and German to some extent, so it helps at least me and probably also Sebastian with the basics; writing down the words is easier, if you hear the letters pronounced as in your language. We learnt numbers from 1-10 and weekdays in Finnish and German, and discussed about how the letters are pronounced differently in our own languages. There’s no big difference, after all, with a couple exceptions, where the letters sound like different ones. We also chatted about Oktoberfest and other festivities, and compared some things in our languages and cultures with each other, and Swedish and English. And as it turned out especially later when we went to Anttila (since I wanted to learn some music and electronics related words), there’s a huge deal of words that are basically just the same.
It was a nice addition to notice, that when Eija and Sebastian discussed mostly in German, I could slowly start to get a clue about what they were saying, though far from exact and even farther away from participating, even in English. But it’s improvement, anyway!
For third meeting (from my part) we headed for a Sunday museum stroll with Sebastian on 5th of October; we visited the Moomin-museum, and several different exhibitions in Vapriikki. There was a lot going on in celebration for Tampere day, so it was a good way to talk more about Finnish culture from many different aspects. Our museum trip wasn’t so much about language, but more about discussing history, everyday things and even a little bit (gasp!) politics. One usually should avoid involving politics into a light chat, but I have to admit, that does tell quite a bit about the country you’re in. Hopefully I managed to give Sebastian a good view of at least a few interesting quirks in this part of the world!
That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll be back quicker than starting this took me!
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