Las tres amigas
12/06/2024 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaI've just come back from my second visit to the Spanish conversation group at the local library.
Both times there were only 4 of us including the MC. And not one hombre to be seen.
I missed last month due to a clash with another event. I'm such a busy Izzie!
The host is not a native speaker herself but has lived around 5 years in South America.
She says if you feel tired or get headaches later, it probably means that your brain has had a good workout.
It's certainly very different to learning on Duolingo.
In a way, it's like a 60 minute taste of what it was like when I was living in Germany & then having to improvise with the basics I had learnt
We started with questions concerning daily routine. What time we usually get up or have breakfast etc
We went around in a circle and I was the lucky last.
I said I get up between 7am & 8am on days I'm working.
So of course Anna (the MC) asked about my work & I explained that I work in the books section of a charity shop.
Later I mentioned that MAD magazine was a really good way to learn German because it's funny, it's possible to work out a lot from the context and all the hypothetical situations
"If I were
Bundeskanzler
President of USA
UK Prime Minister
I would...."
Best way ever to learn the subjunctive I added
Anna groaned. You mean they have the subjunctuve in German too!
(I really don't understand why the poor old Subjunctive gets such a bad rap. It would be a shit language if you could only ever talk about stuff that actually happens)
The MAD article "20 things to do with a Trabant" got us onto the subject of dodgy cars and lemons.
Apparently the Spanish language has not yet adapted this useful term.
But apparently some dialects of Spanish in South America refer to penguins as Pajaros de negocio (loosely translated as Birds in business suits which I think is just utterly adorable)
I'm still having a lot of trouble with having German or Russian being my default foreign language setting.
I'm not sure if other people have a similar problem with code switching.
German is the only foreign language that I ever learnt well enough to feel "at home" listening or speaking and trying to switch it off definitely drains the brain batteries.
If the conversation had been in English I would have been able to mention that 3 economists won a Nobel Prize for their study of Lemons in the car market and the role of assymetric information in general
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2001/popular-information/
Both times there were only 4 of us including the MC. And not one hombre to be seen.
I missed last month due to a clash with another event. I'm such a busy Izzie!
The host is not a native speaker herself but has lived around 5 years in South America.
She says if you feel tired or get headaches later, it probably means that your brain has had a good workout.
It's certainly very different to learning on Duolingo.
In a way, it's like a 60 minute taste of what it was like when I was living in Germany & then having to improvise with the basics I had learnt
We started with questions concerning daily routine. What time we usually get up or have breakfast etc
We went around in a circle and I was the lucky last.
I said I get up between 7am & 8am on days I'm working.
So of course Anna (the MC) asked about my work & I explained that I work in the books section of a charity shop.
Later I mentioned that MAD magazine was a really good way to learn German because it's funny, it's possible to work out a lot from the context and all the hypothetical situations
"If I were
Bundeskanzler
President of USA
UK Prime Minister
I would...."
Best way ever to learn the subjunctive I added
Anna groaned. You mean they have the subjunctuve in German too!
(I really don't understand why the poor old Subjunctive gets such a bad rap. It would be a shit language if you could only ever talk about stuff that actually happens)
The MAD article "20 things to do with a Trabant" got us onto the subject of dodgy cars and lemons.
Apparently the Spanish language has not yet adapted this useful term.
But apparently some dialects of Spanish in South America refer to penguins as Pajaros de negocio (loosely translated as Birds in business suits which I think is just utterly adorable)
I'm still having a lot of trouble with having German or Russian being my default foreign language setting.
I'm not sure if other people have a similar problem with code switching.
German is the only foreign language that I ever learnt well enough to feel "at home" listening or speaking and trying to switch it off definitely drains the brain batteries.
If the conversation had been in English I would have been able to mention that 3 economists won a Nobel Prize for their study of Lemons in the car market and the role of assymetric information in general
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2001/popular-information/
