On Tuesday, February 8, Juri Theresa and I had our first meeting. We meet for lunch at the TAMK University of Applied Sciences so we can get to know each other and organize our next meetings. We met at 11:15 a.m. and the meeting lasted an hour and a half.
We introduced ourselves and established the level of proficiency in the language that each of us wanted to learn. We all agree that we have never studied this language before and that is why acquiring an A1 in the language would be enough.
Although Juri is from Switzerland and Theresa is from Germany, they both teach me German and I teach them Spanish, which has created a bit of pressure and responsibility for me.
Being a first contact meeting, we taught and learned vocabulary and phrases related to it. In my case I learned how to greet and say nice to meet you: “Hello, schön dich kennenzulernen”; as well as how are you: “wie geht es dir?”. I also learned to introduce myself: “Ich bin Paula, ich bin zwanzig Jahre alt und lebe in Spanien” means: I am Paula, I am twenty years old and I live in Spain. I also learned the numbers from one to ten: “eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun und sagen“.
But without a doubt, what this gathering is characterized by is the geography that we learned. In the map app on our mobile phone, we showed each other the location of our country and city and discussed how they were located geographically and the climate was different from that of Finland.
We also talked about the sports that we like to do as well as the typical ones in our countries while we watched athletics on television. For this we did not teach each other words in German or Spanish but it helped us to get to know each other better and the culture of the countries.
Lastly, we ate rice, tuna, bread, and salad. In German it is: “Reis, Thunfisch, Brot und Salat”. I taught them the same thing in Spanish.
Finally, we talked about our next meeting and it would be getting to know the Finnish culture, so we decided to rent some skates and go skating the next day.
The truth is that it was a very interesting meeting, but I admit that by not writing down the vocabulary in a notebook I forgot and had to ask them again. However, I don’t think it’s a very complicated language because it is very similar to English. What I found most difficult was his pronunciation.
Paula Pacho Olmo
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