Classes start much later at Heidelberg than they do in the United States. While most colleges in the US start in late August or early September, classes at Heidelberg started October 15. This is apparently common in Germany, with some exceptions. Signing up for classes was also a different experience. I will assume that most people going on an exchange trip to Heidelberg will have had more German language experience than the absolutely none that I had. It was a little difficult to find the courses and their descriptions because there was not always a web page translation over to English. If I had not had some important links emailed to me from one of the study abroad coordinators, I would have found the task even more overwhelming. Once I had classes that I wanted to take, there were a couple different ways that I could sign up for them which were not completely straight forward. One way is to simply go to the class on the first day and hope that you get a seat. If you get a seat, the professor will most likely add you to the roster after class. However, this means you might have to get to class like 20 minutes early. Another way is to email the professor. The professor will then add you to the class roster him/herself. However, one of my professors who I had emailed never emailed me back. So, I decided to go to that class bright and early Monday morning and try to get a seat that way. There is a board in the English department with a list of all the English classes and room numbers and meeting times. My class was scheduled on that board, so I went to the correct room and only found two other people there and the professor never showed up. I never actually figured out what exactly had happened with that class. It turns out that a while afterwards, I found out there is in fact a way to sign up for courses online by using the LSF page for Heidelberg. That probably would have been the easiest way to sign up. It also probably would have said which classes were cancelled and what not. That would have been quite useful to know before I dragged myself out of bed on a Monday morning for a class that I do not think ever existed?
I will now go on to tell you about my experience in German classes. I will say that unfortunately because of classes, I have not been able to travel around so much since they started. A class generally meets once per week for about an hour and a half to two hours. Some students are lucky enough to have a class schedule worked out where they have all their classes on two or three days and then the rest of the four days in the week off. I am not this lucky and ended up with classes Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I have a German Language intensive class that meets two days per week (which counts as two classes for credits), a Morphology class, and a Language Acquisition class.
The German class has been very challenging since not enough people had signed up for my level, so I had to move up a level to still get all the credits for the class. The class is from 4:30-8 twice a week with a break in the middle. The first few classes, my head hurt from having to sit in a second language for so long and I had to concentrate a lot in order to understand the professor. Now, like a month and a half later, I can understand the professor relatively easily and my head does not hurt anymore, which I like! My biggest problem is that it has taken my speaking ability a lot longer to catch up with everyone else. There is also a very large portion of very basic vocabulary that I missed and would have learned in the second level. However, I am slowly catching up with that. The class is consists of people from all over, including France, Spain, Italy, Norway, US, Ukraine, and Brazil. It has been interesting because the entire class has been in German and some of my classmates do not speak any English at all. I spent the first few weeks of class sitting next to a girl from Ukraine and another girl from Brazil, neither of whom spoke English, but instead Russian and Spanish as other second languages. It was very challenging to do exercises in class because the teacher would explain the exercise in German and then either me or my partner would not completely understand the exercise and then one of us has to explain it to the other, but neither of us know that much German. It went so slowly because we were constantly looking up words in dictionaries. The Ukrainian girl is interesting, as she does track and field in Ukraine like I do at UMASS. I have actually learned a small amount of track and field vocabulary in trying to talk to her about it. Talking with her when the class first started was almost impossible for me because my speaking was so bad, but is much easier now (but still pretty slow). I now sit next to some girls from Spain who are very good at English. The nice thing about that is that although it is a German language class, it is nice to be able to have a few things clarified in English. Now when I try to do the exercises, things move faster and I feel like me and my partner get more out of it because we get more done. This language class is different from other classes at Heidelberg in that we have homework every night. The homework takes me a while, I think longer than other people, because I am still catching up with the class. We do a lot of reading about traveling abroad and what people need to bring with them when they go abroad and what foreigners need to bring with them if they want to work in Germany. We do listening exercises and then a lot about prepositions and relative clauses. We each will have one presentation about I think pretty much any topic and then a final test and then a two to three page paper in German with a relatively flexible topic. The paper has taken me a while because I cannot articulate concisely what I want to say in German like I can in English. My paper is ending up longer than it probably would be for my topic in English.
My other classes are linguistics classes for my major. Language Acquisition is interesting. It is about how children learn to speak their language, starting from the point at which they are born. The class is once per week and we do not have any homework, just weekly reading. The reading is only one chapter, so not too bad if you are interested in the material. Each week, there are different groups of people presenting each chapter. Mine was a presentation on how children first start to acquire syntax. My group members and I took about 45 minutes to present. Otherwise, the professors lectures (as expected) and a lot of the examples are in German. Most of the class is German. While it is not absolutely essential to understand the examples, it is rather helpful and I am glad to be taking my German Language course. The professor also shows up video clips as examples of children acquiring language and how language improves at different ages. At the end of this course, there is a 15 page paper required as the final. The paper can be on most anything having do with language acquisition. Mine will be on second and third language acquisition. I am researching on how second languages influence a person's learning of a third language and am also conducting an experiment to do so.
My Morphology class is probably my most interesting class. When you take a foreign language class, like German, you learn all the endings that go on the verbs, how to make a verb past tense, how to make a noun plural, how to agree and adjective with a noun, etc. This Morphology class is essentially the same thing, but in English and very advanced. I almost feel that the class would be easier if I were not a native speaker. It is easy to pick out different types of inflection and figure out how words go together in a foreign language because that is how you learn it. I never think about that in English, as English is my native language, so even though I fully understand all the material, I make silly mistakes. The class is similar to Language Acquisition in that each class, one student presents that topic. However, the student must find outside research besides the textbooks and enough research to talk about the topic for 20 minutes! The student then had to come up with some sort of short class activity at the end of the presentation. I had the misfortune of going first and actually found doing the research rather challenging. The copyright laws are way more strict in Germany than they are in the US. In the US, you can just look on Google Scholar. Here, you have to go through the HEIDI system in which the school has bought all these articles. However, it depends on your topic. I still had trouble accessing articles, but I know that some people who do science have no trouble at all. I would highly recommend using the UMASS library research (it does not know you are in Germany) or I know a lot of people have friends from their home countries do google searches, then save the pdf's, and then send them the pdf's by email. For the greatest success, you basically have to just plan ahead way more than you would in the US. And then, I would recommend asking your professor exactly how to site your sources, because that can be a little different as well. The other difference between the linguistics classes here and the linguistics classes at UMASS are that they are more theoretical. At UMASS, the test is basically on whether or not you can solve the problem, and sometimes you have to explain what you used to solve the problem. In this Morphology class at Heidelberg, the professor gave us a mock final exam to see how we would do. A large portion of the exam is choose one out of three important linguists and explain how they influenced the field of linguistics. I was not expecting to have to know this at all. It does not matter how well I can do the morphology problems, I still have to know this extra material as well. I can see how this material is important, it is just different than in the US.
Sorry to have written so much with so few pictures in this post. I just feel that if I had already known a lot of this stuff before having to experience it, life would have been significantly easier.
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