Deutschkurs

I am now nearing the end of 10 solid weeks of German classes.  I remember after my first class thinking, well that was fun for a day but there is no way I'm going to take another class after this first one.  And here I am, nearly 10 weeks in and nearly 2 courses complete and I am truly amazed at everything I have learned.  I am NO WHERE near fluent or even competent but I can understand what is being said 95% of the time during class and am now engaging with the language in a way that I didn't even attempt to before.
My class meets daily from 9AM until 1PM.  We have one 15 minute break and one 5 minute break.  The class is taught 100% in German.  I truly believe that full immersion is the very best way to learn a language but man, by that 4th hour my eyes get a bit glassed over and my head is so full of information that it is hard to really concentrate.  This is so completely different to how I learned Spanish.  I had taken 2 very lame years of high school Spanish where I learned closed to nothing.  Then worked at an orphanage in Mexico and fell in love with the language and the people and the culture.  And after my first service trip to Mexico I kept going on more and more trips to orphanages and lived in the orphanage for the summer and then got a job that allowed me to live in Mexico part time and all the while I would study Spanish on my own, making charts and conjugating verbs and really loving the actual learning of the language.  The only time I took an actual Spanish class was when I went back to school to become a Spanish teacher I had to have a few classes on my transcript to get my Spanish endorsement.  I think I took two 400 level classes where I learned to write properly and learned the grammar but at this point I was already conversational so it was much easier to just fill in the gaps.  Which feels nothing like my current German learning.  But, it is interesting, as I learn German I almost always go to Spanish and then to English when I translate it in my head.  So, in a way, I guess I'm practicing my Spanish at the same time.
So, back to German class.... On top of the 4 hours of class we get nightly homework that can take 15-45 minutes of time at home.
I really enjoy the class and really like my teachers and my classmates.  I often feel like we are in some kind of mental boot camp together and we are a cohort who can laugh at each other help each other along on this language journey.
My classmates continue to take it all so very seriously.  I am too, to a degree, but I think because I know just how far we have to go to become conversational it just feels like a waste sometimes but if you don't try then you certainly never will learn it.  It took years and a lot of passion to become conversationally fluent in Spanish and I just don't know if I have it in me.  But, I can now make appointments at the Dr.'s office.  I can communicate in restaurants, grocery stores and on the bus, trains, etc.  All in German.  All with a terrible accent but I am able to communicate and understand in another language and that does feel pretty good.
It is interesting that although the class is taught 100% in German and any other language spoken, even among the students, is frowned upon.  It does force us to communicate in German but since we are all just beginners it makes communicating with my classmates difficult.  I sit in between 2 very serious students.  One middle aged woman from Brazil and one younger man from the small West African country of Benin.  Neither of them speaks English and we all just barely speak German.  Interesting is a nice way of putting it.  We communicate in the most rudimentary forms.  We high five when we get something right (this honestly feels SO good to understand and complete an exercise correctly - we high five with vigor and stupid grins) or we slap our forehead and groan at another new, confusing concept in this very difficult language.  The Brazilian woman really likes to talk and I truly like her but it is so difficult for me to understand her German!!  I try really really hard but she has a thick Portuguese accent and my German level is pretty low.  I keep telling her that we should just speak in Spanish (me) and Portuguese (her)and I honestly can understand her Portuguese more than her German.  She does not speak English.  The man from Benin speaks French but not English and he has a very thick French/British accent when he speaks German.  So, yeah, we use a lot of hand motions and gestures.
My teachers are both really good and oh, so German. If anyone shows up even one or two minutes past 9, they are greeted with a "guten abend" (good afternoon rather than a good morning to highlight the fact that they were late.) I was a couple of minutes late one day and one day only.  Because the other thing they do is as you are trying to quietly get to your chair and unload your books from your backpack and set up your things they immediately call on you to answer a question in which you have no clue as to even what they have been talking about.   But they are EXTREMELY patient with us.  I remember teaching very low levels of English and the patience a teacher of this level of language has to have is immense. 

A few of my classmates at the computer lab

My classmates and I all sound a bit like a 2 year old trying to sound out words that are not comfortable in our mouths and make the most elementary mistakes by the minute.  But they wait us out.  Which is pretty amazing.  But they also are still so German in that if you say something that isn't quite right, they do wait it out but then scrunch up their faces as if you farted and say "nein"  and then spit out what we should have said.
The language itself is extremely difficult.  It is more of a puzzle than a language.  Most of our time is spent looking around the classrooms to the various large posters or placards with charts.  You see in German you have to figure out if something is Nominative, Akkustive, Dative or Genetiv.  Then figure out if the word is masculine, feminine, neutral or plural.  Then find the word that correlates to this exact puzzle piece.  It really seems more like a puzzle than a language.  It really is a bit like a rubrics cube.  And it is EXHAUSTING.  It truly is.  But each and every day I make progress.  Each and every day I use the language in new and mostly correct ways.  My accent will always be poor because... well, because have you tried to speak this language? But I've just signed up for the next 5 week course so I guess I deem it worthwhile to spend my time and money on it.  Here is to expanding my brain and to one day being a bit closer to conversational.