It's Thursday and the first week at Freie Universität has almost reached its end. The actual courses won't start until mid-October (thank goodness, I haven't yet had the slightest glimpse of any course programmes, I guess I should do something about that here in the near future), but I'm participating in an intensive course in German, which will last until the beginning of the semester.
We met on Monday morning at 8 AM, something I think should be prohibited by international law on the grounds of human rights and world peace, and first there was this basic "Welcome to the FU, we hope you'll enjoy your stay here and in Berlin" yadda yadda yadda. After that, all the participants were to take a placement test, according to which the actual groups were formed starting Tuesday.
I "scored" the CEFR level B2, which was the highest level among the participants, but I really feel I belong in an A2 group or something. Everyone in my group speaks at least a gazillion times better German than I do, I feel really tongue-tied and can't seem to get it round anything I'm trying to say. My head just goes completely blank from all the pathetic vocabulary I've managed to gather in my tiny head, not to mention my complete inability to pronounce anything properly. Or at least so it feels, and I'm really having trouble imagining that I could ever manage this language fluently, Swedish-speaker or not. (For those readers who don't know, Swedish is my mother tongue. Apparently it should be very helpful in the learning of German, Germanic languages as they both are. So it does in theory, but I'm proving practice to be something completely different.)
Oh well... We have a proverb in Finnish saying "Siberia will teach" (meaning one will eventually learn the hard way), I guess Berlin will be my Siberia. [Does this make me the 21st-century Zakrevsky, who called Finland "his Siberia", and, thus, Berlin the 21st-century Grand Duchy of Finland?! Oh goodness, that was such a crappy history nerd joke that everyone should just ignore it, and it shouldn't even be published – but let it be my punishment as public humiliation.] Enough of this whine now, it's almost past my bedtime and tomorrow it's Friday, meaning parteey!
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