I just had my second German class yesterday morning. I'm realizing that I'm significantly more advanced than most of the other students, but I think that there's still a lot that I can get out of the class. The professor explained things about past participles that I had never quite put together:
- Participles of strong verbs always end in -en. (verbs are strong if the
past participle changes vowels from the present tensethere is any vowel change at all, like "I sing -> I have sung" in English, which is very similar in German: „ich singe“ -> „ich habe gesungen“) - Participles with inseperable prefixes never get a „ge-“ in the beginning (ich habe verstanden)
- Participles with seperable prefixes do get a „ge-“ in the beginning (ich bin aufgegangen)
- Participles based on Latin words generally do not get a „ge-“, and generally end in „t“ (ich habe studiert)
I'm sure that I have plenty of holes like this from being self, and hopefully this class will fill a lot of them. I'm sure the speaking and writing practice will help a lot too. I think I've already gotten used to my professor's American accent, and thankfully the air conditioner was off, so I could understand almost everything he said in German.
I'm not too nervous anymore about keeping up with the class. I don't think I should have an issue keeping up with Indonesian for the next couple of months.
I'm exactly 20% of the way to a golden Indonesian tree. I've basically carved it into six sections. I have the first section up to level 4 out of 5, and I'm almost done getting the second section up to level 3. Then I'll get the second section to 4, and then start working on the third section.