Author Archives: Gabor

Easter far from home

meine Lernunterlagen

Hi!

So we’re back from the Easter Holidays, what meant 4 days of free time here in Germany – great! Normally, this is time for the family to gather around the table and see each other, talking about what happened since Christmas… right? But what can a foreigner do in a mostly unknown town for 4 days? Of  course – exploring it!

Besides bringing a little of Easter feeling to the WG (mostly by eating things that you usually do this time of the year), we took a trip to Potsdam, to see how different it is from Berlin.. well, it completely is! Compared to Berlin’s cosmopolitan lifestyle, it’s like a small village, with one main street of shops and restaurants, and a disturbing amount of palaces.. in fact, you can’t really find an avarage house there, only villas and really expensive-looking buildings. If you are deeper interested, you can fin some photos here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/liebergabor/BerlinPotsdam#

Classrom in the brake

Back to the DeutschAkademie, on the first day after holidays like this it’s always hard to concentrate. As you can see on the photo, everyone just waited for the brake to get out to the air..
Luckily, Anne (our teacher) could manage the situation, and by the second part of the class it ended in a great teamwork on creating a story with sentences following eachother – each of them in Praeteritum, as it was today’s grammatic theme.


The fact that we learn grammar, do interesting speaking excercises and games, read and analyse stories, listen to recordings etc. results in 3 hours that pass by so fast, that you never get bored, and always return home with the feeling of „knowing more, than yesterday“.

Hopefully, I’ll know more tomorrow as well – until then, good bye!
Gabor

Berlin

Berlin

Dear readers!

Today’s post is about this city I hardly got the chance to know yet, but I’m exploring its tiny details day by day. When it comes to Berlin, a lot of things can come to one’s mind, mostly related to the II. World War and its consequences: The 1936 Olympic Games, the burning down of the Reichstag, the bombings, then the Wall of Berlin – and they are still parts of the city. In fact, this year is the 20th jubilee of the comedown of the Wall, with several exhibitions on the subject, and the Olympic Stadium is still a touristic spectacle.

What I didn’t know about the city, is.. well, almost everything else. The huge amount of people riding bicycles, the large parks attracting thousands of families and youngsters for a picnic or just a sun-bath, the wide and calm streets of the weekends and the milling crowds of different cultures rushing out every day when sun goes down to enjoy the nightlife.. the lovely habit of having breakfast on the street while enjoying the first beams of the sun, eating mostly bio vegetables and fruits of the early spring.. and I still have so much to discover!

What I can promise is that I’ll keep my camera always at hand, and try to capture the most interesting things with a foreigner’s eye. These pictures you can see at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/liebergabor/BerlinMix#

See you,
Gabor

Learning german in Berlin

Lernen

Hi everyone!

There, you can see me doing my homework.. sometimes it’s not that easy! But the reason is to get better, so I’ll do what I have to do for it. But how did this whole learning-german thing started? Since I have to learn this language better to get a good job here, I immediately started to look for a language school the first day I got here, and I found DeutschAkademie to be the cheapest and – as it seemed -the best oppurtunity in Berlin. So far, it was a great choice!

This day we talked and listened to pre-recorded conversations about different kinds of places to live, and how to find a flat or room to rent here, which was really interesting, because one month earlier we actually did this phone and personal interviews with my girlfriend ourselves! Although, we were only looking for a relatively cheap WG (which stands for Wohn-Gemeinschaft, and means a big flat with 3-4 rooms for each people and a common kitchen and bathroom), with flatmates that we could imagine as friends, and we had big luck that we could find one in only 1 day (with previous weeks of emailing of course). I have some photos of it, if you’d like to get a picture of it:
http://picasaweb.google.com/liebergabor/BerlinWG#

That’s for today, now back to my homework!
Gabor

My language school in Berlin

gabor2thumbnail.JPG

Hi again!

First day at my language school in Berlin. I bet all of you have sweet memories of that… for me, this time it was a bit nostalgic – when I finished the University, I thought I’d never sit and listen for hours like that again – and I still didn’t, ‚cause this is something completely different. We have a great group with 9 other people from different countries and cultures (Bolivia, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Canada, France, Sweden) with the age from 18 to 51 years, and each of them is interesting in a way – that’s how our first task, to get to know eachother with asking basic german starting questions lasted a bit longer than our teacher expected.. It was also a surprise for me that I could still talk in german (it was a few years back that I last used the language, as a surf instructor), and it was really exciting. We spoke a lot, which was great, and I’m not as bad at it as I expected. Anne, our teacher is very helpful, and understands if we have issues with grammar, although she always corrects the spoken mistakes as well, which is a great way of improving.

Before the first day at the Academy we spent the weekend looking around in Berlin, and found a great lake (although it didn’t happen by chance, since I saw it from the plane when we were landing), which is called Müggelsee. Before that I couldn’t imagine a city to have an entire lake with sailboats, sandy beach, pine forests on the shore – it’s just amazing! I took some pictures (including this one in the entry, which was taken while I stood in the ice cold water), if you are interested, visit my Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/liebergabor/BerlinMuggelsee#

That’s for today, see you next time!
Gabor

Introduction

Lieber Gábor

Hi all! My name is Lieber Gábor – and I know, but this sounds funny only in German.. So, I’m a fresh student of DeutschAkademie, and also a new author of this blog. As I noticed, almost everyone writes here in German,  still I’ll begin in English. On one hand, I’m not that good in written German (that’s the main reason I took the course), on the other hand, for the readers and possible students of the Academy it may be better to read information on a language they can already understand (I know I found it hard to read the entries of this blog first).

So, I come from Hungary, and I’ve only been in Berlin, Germany since the 1st of April. I came here to be with my girlfriend who got a great job at an architectural office beginning in March.

Besides from learning at the Academy, and trying to explore this beautiful city together, I still have some work to do for my ex-firma (I worked as designer for civil engineering projects back in Hungary), and in the rest of the day I usually keep looking for job advertisements online and in local newspapers.

As for starters, I can say that it’s quite exciting just to live here, and I’ll try to post my photos and new experiences regularly here, so that you can get a taste of my point of view.

See you, Gabor