Julia's Blog

Through a language partner program I met a girl called Katrina, who studies foreign languages at Shenzhen University. Her studies include the languages English and French and she could also choose a third language, where she decided to learn German. I didn’t actually know, that you could learn German at Shenzhen University and I was even more surprised to hear that every year 15-30 Students choose to learn the language (even though compared to the number of students at the University it is a very little number)!

So last Tuesday I joined Katrina’s German class, because I was very interested to see how the students learn German. The students of this class were in the second semester of their studies and they usually study German for three semesters.

The class was held in the evening from 19:30-21:00, which was for me also kind of a strange time to have class but as I saw there are a lot of students who attend class at this time.

The teacher’s German was very good as she did her Masters degree in Germany. At the beginning of the class, the students had to ask me some questions and at the beginning they were quite shy, but then they came up with really good questions. The rest of the class they studied a lesson in their book which was called “Beim Arzt” (at the doctor’s). Their book was build very similar to my chinese book, there were new word, dialogues, questions and exercises. However I was surprised by some words they had to learn, like “Versichertenkarte” (insurance card) and “horchen”.

Here you can see the book which they use to learn German and I also attach a recording for you so you can see how much you understand. As the class was half German and half Chinese, I was able to understand 90% of it!