#linguavertlessons

Wrong: “Ich möchte _____” Correct: “Ich hätte gerne _____”

I’ve been used to “Ich hätte gerne _____” for some time, thanks to all the German series I watch; but sure enough, both my old textbook and the textbook my students are using teach us: “Ich möchte _____.”

Now, I get that “Ich hätte gerne _____” is pretty advanced grammar. But so is “Ich möchte _____” -- especially when combined with the infinitive, which it is in my students’ A1 book. But everyone is expected to memorize “Ich möchte _____” now and to understand it later. So why not “Ich hätte gerne _____,” if this is the phrase that is actually used?

Everyone had been feeling pretty good about themselves this week.

Then they met the dative case. 

Oh, their faces . . .

Der-die-das-die and den-die-das-die are pretty easy. I’m sure several people thought they had everything in the bag -- or at least would pretty soon.

Today I resumed my teaching career . . . as a German teacher!

I have (very many) mixed feelings about this. I’ve had them for several weeks -- ever since my new boss e-mailed me to welcome me on board. And it was because I hadn’t sorted them out that this post is late in coming. But I don’t want another day to go by without a record for posterity.

It is hard to be honest about what I feel. There’s a part of me that thinks I’m a big fraud and that it’s only a matter of time before my new boss figures it out and rues the day she hired me. But there’s also that part of me that has seven years of teaching experience under her belt -- the part that has been asking, since A2.2 class, “How would I teach this unit differently?”

Well, today, I taught an A1.1 unit differently. And while I had a few private flashes of amazement that everyone there believed I knew exactly what I was doing, I also had to admit to myself that I knew enough of what I was doing to be able to do it well.

For everyone wondering about the content of the lesson:

They learned to conjugate the following verbs: sein, heißen, wohnen, kommen, arbeiten, machen, and haben. I drilled them on each one by asking questions, so they also learned the following question words: wer, wie, wie alt, wie viele, wo, and woher.

They also started reading numbers in German. 

In my experience, all foreign language courses pair body parts with pain. In French class: J’ai mal à la tête . . . In Italian class: Mi fa male la testa . . . In German class: Mein Kopf tut mir weh . . .

If there’s another theme out there that makes a better partner for body parts, language teachers haven’t found it yet.

(Or have they? If so, please let me know!)

At the start of class, I gave my students a new way to frame their German lessons. First, I explained that I didn’t like teaching to a test, because tests hardly ever reflect real life situations. But at the same time, I understand that my students will not experience those real life situations until they pass the B2 exam required by their employer. So is there something that one has to do in both exams and real life?

Yes there is. One has to answer questions.

So I showed them how many questions they could already answer.

Lektion 1: Wie heißen Sie? Woher kommen Sie? Wo wohnen Sie? usw.

Lektion 2: Was ist das? Was kostet es? Wie viele _____ sind da? (Answer with nominative case)

Lektion 3: Was essen/trinken/nehmen/bestellen/bezahlen Sie? (Answer with accusative case)

Lektion 4: Was machen Sie da? Wie viel Uhr machen Sie da? Wie spät ist es? (Most questions ask about time)

Lektion 5: Wo ist das? Wo können/dürfen Sie _____? (Most questions ask about location)

Then I introduced Lektion 6 . . .

“If you were on duty in the emergency room and somebody came in crying that he was in pain, what would you ask?”

The class clown answered immediately: “Woher kommen Sie?” 

After they stopped laughing, the serious answer came: “What do you have?” or “What hurts?” Or as we say in German: “Was haben Sie?” oder “Was tut Ihnen weh?”

Over the rest of the two-hour period, we did drills and exercises on different body parts and common illnesses.

After they came back from the break, I asked another question:

“You’ve finish treating the first patient and someone else is wheeled in. He is covered in blood and guts. What’s the first question that comes to mind?”

They answered as one: “What happened?”

"Exactly. Or as we say in German: ‘Was ist passiert?’“

Today was really productive. My students are much more comfortable with German conjugation now. And they understand the rules for das Perfekt more clearly, although memorizing the perfect forms may still be a challenge. This is a great development and I’m quite happy.

But time went by a lot faster than I wanted it to today. There were a couple more drills I had hoped to let them do. They’ll still get to do them tomorrow, but they also have to take the test tomorrow. I had wanted to give them more to sleep on. 

It turned out that asking people about their Alltag or daily routine is really boring.

As soon as people started talking about their last vacations, however, the room came alive!

When I was planning the lesson, I wanted “Was hast du gestern gemacht?” to be the warm-up drill and “Was hast du im Urlaub gemacht?” to be the fun drill -- the one you feel more confident about taking part in because you already had some practice. But I’m also fairly sure my students picked up 5% of the first drill and 95% of the fun drill.

One American songwriter has said that he after he writes a good song, he takes the chorus of that song, turns it into the first verse of a second song which he has to write a new chorus for, and ends up with a second song that is better than the first. I’d like to do something like that in the future.

My students learned der, die and das (as well as ein, eine and ein) yesterday, and now they’re taking their second quiz. The course is going pretty fast. I can’t say I’m a big fan of the timeline.

It’s really overwhelming for them. Not just because German is so new, but also because there’s great pressure on them to pass a B2 exam under independent examiners in a little over a year. So it really pains me to see them doing really well in classroom activities, then going absolutely blank once the quiz starts. After the oral portion of today’s test, I saw one of my students sitting with his head in his hands, moaning to his friends: “What I spent the most time memorizing, I forgot first.”

Quizzes are just one way to measure learning -- and going by how poorly quiz scores reflect what I know they can already do, not even the best way. Not by far.

But they’re also part of the syllabus, whether I like it or not. And I have to train my students to take them better.

This time around, I sacrificed “fun” elements for something more straightforward. For one part of the oral test, I showed them a photo of a kitchen and asked them to name three things in the kitchen and three things not in the kitchen. Using correct articles with the nouns, of course. Wouldn’t that be easy, I thought.

Well, if they had had a few more days to go over the new vocabulary, perhaps it would have been. But the freedom to name any three of the familiar things in the kitchen -- and to name any three of the other words in their memory -- was a bit too much.

If I could design the test all over again, I’d limit them to answering yes-or-no questions like: “Ist da ein Kühlschrank in der Küche?” It would be a simpler, but still effective memory test.

No matter how optimistic and hopeful the Lektiontag the day before, the Prüfungtag changes everything. Everyone remembers that they’re not really learning German for fun.

The last time I was a foreign language trainer, my learners had a huge say in how their lessons went. If they just wanted to do drills for the simple past tense for half an hour, that was okay. If they wanted to discuss a video they had seen in the news, I happily obliged. If they thought the third conditional was too hard for them to master that year, I set it aside indefinitely and moved on. If they wanted corrections for grammar but none on pronunciation, I adapted accordingly. Each learner was in his own driver’s seat; I was the trusted navigator who didn’t mind taking the scenic routes.

My new job couldn’t be more different. I have fourteen students who all need to follow the same timeline, learning the same things, at the same pace, using the same methods, and passing the same tests. No wonder no one likes Prüfungtag.

I’d say the main problem with all classroom testing is the way it emphasizes how far you are from where you want to be -- or worse, where the syllabus designer wants you to be. It makes you feel inadequate and demotivated.

My own approach to language learning is the opposite. You should be regularly checking how far you are now from where you started. You’re always moving forward and always improving, no matter how slow you may seem to yourself. You may feel that the your future self isn’t getting impatient with you . . . but in the meantime, your past self is in awe of everything you can now do. 

What I want to tell my struggling students is: “Okay, so maybe you didn’t pass Prüfung 3. But less than two weeks ago, you didn’t know enough German to even try!”

Heute ist es sehr gut gelaufen, danke.

Our new verbs today were essen and trinken -- so of course, we also learned about the Akkusativ today. Everyone formed their sentences much more quickly than last week, which was heartening.

Some of those sentences were pretty complicated, too! They had to use morgens (or a similar adverb of time) and gerne or lieber. I think they’ll need more work with genre and lieber, though. And they’ll get that work!

Last week, I let myself get complacent after some really good classroom drills, only for a lot of people to go blank during test itself. I’m not making that mistake again.

Grammar is one thing; vocabulary, quite another. Today my class “met” about thirty new words for food and drink. And based on their answers during today’s drills, they easily recalled the words themselves, but had a lot more trouble remembering the genders of the words.

I had thought about writing a song like one of Uwe Kind’s SingLingual or LingoTech songs. (He composed the Mein Auto ist kaputt song that I shared a few days ago.) Here is his “Das” Lied 1 for remembering some sachliche words:

And I actually did scribble out some (really, really bad) verses, though I wasn’t able to come up with melodies for them. Which doesn’t really matter, I guess, because when the chance came to share them with my students, I totally lost my nerve.

On the other hand, I don’t mind sharing them on this blog! Here are my verses for the Lektion 3 Wortschatz:

Der Salat, der Käse, der Fish --  Was sonst ist da auf dem Tisch? Der Teller, der Joghurt, der Reis Und der Wein sind alle weiß. Der Kaffee, der Tee und der Kuchen zum Nachtisch ist das, was wir suchen.

Die Kartoffel, die Wurst und die Butter Bekomme ich gerne, o Mutter! Die Cola, die Milch und die Flasche Steck’ ich nicht in meine Tasche. Die Pizza, die Suppe, die Pommes frites für die Grüppe Aber diese sind nicht meine Masche!