Wow, I've been here in Germany for nearly four months now, and I can barely speak a word of German. I'm walking around with my typical expatriate 'menu-German'. You know, the kind of language one picks up in order eat, along with a few other choice words. But, as my answer to 'how long have you been here?' is starting to show its age, and proves each day to be a weaker defence against the inevitable 'do you speak any German?' question, I decided to put my money where my mouth had as yet never been and take a language class. To be fair, inquiring into language classes was one of the first things I did after getting here, but to be more fair, I had given up pretty easily when I was unable to find one right away. Understandably, the university here does not offer beginner's classes in its language of instruction. The public schools were not offering a summer semester, and private schools were horrendously expensive, and did not appear to offer any night classes. I finally sent an email to the membership of the AIESEC chapter here in Cologne asking if anybody would like to trade help with English for help with German. I met a couple of times with Plamen, a really friendly guy originally from Bulgaria, but since I was starting from the absolute beginning and needed some serious grammar lessons. I was finding it pretty difficult with only an hour or two a week. But something happened the other day that put an end to my searching. We got an new employee in the office, Luis from Portugal. Luis also wanted to take a German class because he needs to deal directly with customers in German, and wanted to polish his German up. He ran into the same problems with no night classes, so the team decided that it would be best if he simply took the mornings off of work to go to school. Perfect. Now I go to school three hours a day, five days a week, and meet Plamen to practice what I've learned.
