longer.blue

i signed up for online german classes and we had our first session today, shit went down pretty well: - we did a round of intros and the first few people were like "oh i want to do my postgrad in germany" "i work for a multinational company and might get assigned to a german-speaking country" "i have relatives there and want to visit them" and i didn't want to look like the german equivalent of a weeb so i said something about potential postgrad opportunities before stating my real reason (wanting to understand the german songs in my music library). after me a few people said they were just learning for fun though so i felt better. - i have never realized how bizarre conjugation is if you've never studied a european language before and/or if your native language itself doesn't have extensive conjugations. our teacher was trying to introduce it in the gentlest way ("notice that when you ask you say 'woher *kommen* Sie' or 'woher *kommst* du' but you reply with 'ich *komme*'", that kind of thing) and some of my classmates were all ???? later on i got paired with a classmate to work on a fill-in-the-blanks conjugation exercise together and they were pretty confused so i had to explain the concept of conjugation - [re: the above, my classmates aren't stupid monolingual americans or anything. we're filipinos so we are AT LEAST bilingual. several of them speak another ph language on top of english and filipino/tagalog. philippine languages don't have conjugation tho, the verb form doesn't change according to speaker] - i really did not have to mention to people that i'm also learning latvian, mostly bc i thought it would invite more questions and make me look even more like the european equivalent of a weeb, but. i couldn't help it. at the end of the class we had to do a little monologue on what our names are, where we're from, what languages we speak etc, and i could've JUST SAID "ich lerne aktuell Deutsch" just like everyone else BUT i had to fuckin throw in "und Lettisch" at the end. thankfully no one commented on it (not even our teacher lmao) so i'm marked safe for now i guess. idk what will happen when i start making mistakes that are only understandable if you know i am also studying latvian though.