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[muckefuck]

I have a check in my pocket for my first German tutoring lesson in more than a decade. It's not a big check since I'm only charging "friend" prices. But that's fair, because as it stands I'm probably learning as much in these lessons as the man I'm instructing.

He's had a year of formal instruction already, and a solid year at that--most people I've spoken to with that little German under their belts don't have his skills. I credit the fact that he's learned a couple languages before. (He even tutors Hebrew himself.) When it comes to pronunciation, he's curiously stumped by äu and eu and has the usual trouble distinguishing u and ü, despite the fact that one of the languages under his belt is French. Speaking of belts, I'm going to have to start hitting him with one if he can't stop saying [ŋg] for ng. (Damn Long Guylanders!)

Word order will likely be my biggest challenge, though we'll see what happens after I've hit him with the kickass Lohnes-Strothmann model. Right now he's more fixated on getting his adjective endings right. I keep telling him we'll drill those conversationally (and we have, on at least three occasions so far), but he wants a chart. And he wants homework, so I've given him a list of adjectives to make sentences of (e.g. "Der Bär ist groß. Das ist ein großer Bär.") and clock times to write out. (Ich war versucht, ihm "dreiviertel 8" usw. beizubringen, aber schließlich wollte ich ihn nicht überhäufen.)

The hard part for me, of course, is making sure I don't tell him any lies. And that's tougher than it ought to me since I'm so rusty. He was even taunting me about it at the end of the evening, asking, "How can you teach me German when you don't even know it!" because I couldn't figure out how to translate "work" in a sample sentence he came up with. (Less than a minute after he left, I texted him "funktioniert".) Fortunately, I took an online quiz yesterday and my endings are rock solid. It's just everything else (from gender to pragmatics) I have to worry about!

That's another thing: as you might've guessed from the check, he's really old school. He didn't even text until I browbeat him into it and his response to doing homework online was decisive: "I want something on paper that I can write out." He even suggested mailing his homework to me so I could correct it before the next lesson and he wasn't talking about e-mail. So I guess the pressure is off me to raise my game and learn to teach like they do in the 21st century.

Comments

[itchwoot.livejournal.com]

Dreiviertel 8 sagt man eh nur im Süden Deutschlands, überall anders wird man damit nur hochgezogene Augenbrauen ernten. ;-)
Das musste ich auch erst lernen... hier im Rheinland sagt man "Viertel vor 9".

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Ich hab ihn schon gewarnt, dass er von mir einem südlichen Akzent kriegen würde!

[pne.livejournal.com]

Dreiviertel 8 sagt man eh nur im Süden Deutschlands

Wirklich?

Soweit ich weiß, ist das auch im Osten der (vereinten) Republik verbreitet.

Eine Kollegin aus Stralsund/Rügen und ein Kollege aus Berlin benutzen zum Beispiel beide diese Konstruktion.

[itchwoot.livejournal.com]

Ja, ein Arbeitskollege aus Sachsen kannte das auch so, aber ich weiß nicht, wie weit sich das tatsächlich erstreckt... jedenfalls ist es im Westen nicht üblich. ;-)