Classes ...

Wow, I'm feeling slightly dizzy ... I've had seven hours of classes today, with only about half an hour for lunch (something like a Fleischpflanzerl in the school's cafeteria)! After that I only felt up to a quick trip to the post office and from there went straight back home. So I guess I'll tell you some more details about classes today.

Every day, we have four lessons from 10 am to 2 pm, each lasting about 50 minutes. Unlike in China (at the language school as well as in the university course), we do not different have different classes, but stay with the same teacher and the same group all the time. As far as I have seen, there are only young female teachers and all of them are really nice, so nothing to complain there. Most of the groups are for absolute or nearly absolute beginners, i.e. A1, and there's nothing above B2. Some people got books, but in our class we're handed out photocopies every other day. Each group has between 5 and 10 students, but there seem to be problems with the placement. I've met people who had to start from scratch although they had already learned for half a year back in Germany and they were told that the groups were too big to change. Admittedly, there was a whole bunch of newcomers this week, so maybe things will have settled next week. The classes themselves are pretty much standard, working in pairs, presenting the results to the group, doing exercises ... we work on different subjects for about six lessons, so on the first day it was describing people, then we moved to the instrumental (case) and from tomorrow on, we will talk about dates. We do get homework and everyone seems to do it, but at least till now, it wasn't too much.

The cool thing about the Studienstiftung's programme is that it includes an intensive course, which means that you get an additional 2.5 hours every wednesday and friday. It depends on your level, but there are never more than four people in a class and it focusses on speaking rather than teaching systematically. It's only me and another guy in our class and we watched a short cartoon about health today. Keeping up with writing all the new vocabulary down while answering the teacher's questions turned out to be challenging, but I'm pretty sure that this will boost my sparse knowledge a lot :-).