There were times when there was no Internet. There were analog telephones. You either had to go to a phone booth or go back home if you wanted to tell your boyfriend or girlfriend that you were running late.
The Brothers Grimm hiked through Germany and collected the fairy tales that people told them in the various places between Hanau and Kassel. They W.A.L.K.E.D or took a carriage.
A German course from your pocket. Is that possible?
Aren’t we very very spoiled today?
We carry around the Internet in our pockets, which allows us to access any word we want. We can have entire sentences and texts translated in no time in order to understand something that is written or said in the foreign language. The only problem is that we know what it means at that moment, but we don’t remember it. Our brain simply doesn’t work that way. It has to hear and see a word several thousand times. The person must also produce it himself by speaking and writing, so that he remembers it. Memory is very much tied to associations, actions, situations that go along with the word or phrase. This is why learning separate vocabulary lists and translating the learned vocabulary into spontaneous utterances in a conversation is so difficult. Vocabulary lists lack associations, actions, and situations.
Integration and language
English is present everywhere, because everyone in the world speaks it. Many Germans are happy to brush up their English with the colleague from Egypt, the neighbour from Japan. And you also want to be polite, because you think “the other person can’t understand me (yet), so I’ll make it easier for him. And besides, it is also much more practical, because it is faster.” That’s what we BELIEVE. But in fact, it doesn’t at all help the other one to learn the language. What is more, it actually prevents him/her to learn it.
The other day I read a “cry for help” on the Internet from a person who wrote that she has been living in Germany for 3 years and so far has had no contact with Germans. She asked the community what advice they could give her to make friends. Everyone advised her to learn the German.
The language of the country I live in is the key to integration.
If I make it possible for the other person who is learning my mother tongue to learn it, I am at the same time giving him the opportunity to integrate. By trying to make it easy for him, by immediately switching to English, I DENY him both opportunities.
The foreign language gives us the opportunity to integrate and to express ourselves differently and in a new way and thus to see things in a new and different way and perhaps allows us a different view on and about OURSELF.
How do we want to get to know new things if we always see them through the glasses of our mother tongue or through those of English?
What can we express through the foreign language that we do not express or express differently in our mother tongue? It would be exciting to have this experience, wouldn’t it?
Our language school in Frankfurt Main is in the center of the city: German courses A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2
German evening courses, German intensive courses, German morning courses in small groups, online German courses and offline German courses.
We live what we teach. Join our regular meetings to exchange ideas in German, our excursions to the regions around Frankfurt, celebrations in the city of Frankfurt and of course always with a teacher you can always ask if you want to be corrected or if you want to know something about the German language. Register in our Facebook group with content exclusively for our course participants.
The SprachPassion team is looking forward to meeting YOU!
Leave A Comment