photo: After School Hustle
How to sustain Berlin’s status as a creativity hub and support its talent? How to make sure the art scene remains inclusive and reinforces the community? Luckily, there are guys in Berlin who care about finding answers to those questions – and will go to great lengths creating projects that truly have a positive impact on the community. After School Hustle is a great example – and it addresses the folks that really have the potential to make a change in the decades to come – the high school students!
The program, founded and directed by Pawel Mordel, provides free skill-building workshops for high schoolers in Berlin. After School Hustle is still quite a recent project. They’ve just started out in the summer of the previous year and yet what they’ve accomplished so far is already pretty impressive.
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by Michalina | People
photo: Deutsch for Dich
Earlier this month marked my third year anniversary of living in Berlin. Though I have a permanent WG in Schillerkiez (the best Kiez in Berlin), a handsome German boyfriend with no interest in polyamory (the holy grail!), and a close-knit group of hilarious friends, I still don’t feel like a true Berliner.
Why? Because I don’t speak German.
I can read and understand most things, but every time I try to say something other than “Tschüs!” I freeze.
When I was visiting family in the USA a few months ago, I was amazed at my charisma. I was cracking jokes with the Waffle House waitresses, articulately asking for directions to the nearest Target and politely inquiring where the Kombucha section was in Whole Foods. I couldn’t believe how confident and shiny I was, not just around my family and friends, but out in the real world. Who was this girl? In Berlin, I shrink inside of myself every time I have to speak German with anyone. Upon returning and feeling my shiny-self dull more and more, I decided that learning German was no longer some frivolous thing expats like me talk about doing, it’s something that I needed to do order to let my true self shine.
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by Guest Author | Stories
The Berlino Team
Despite your motivation or ability, learning a new language can be a drag: Until words start making sense, what you experience is constant confusion. The need of a language becomes even more imposing when you’ve moved to the country in which it is spoken: no matter how willing people are to speak in English to accommodate you, awkward situations where you don’t know what is happening in daily life are inevitable: the lady talking to you on the street, the cashier at the supermarket, the signs all around the city.
Berlino Schule, the newly created language school by the team behind Berlino Magazine, is ready to meet the challenges that make learning German unattractive, while keeping their price very very attractive: only 4 Euro/hr. They are devoted to providing a friendly atmosphere for their students, where they can feel as adults learning and not school kids. The groups are small in each class, and the staff keeps exploring new, innovative ways in order to make learning more effective and fun. We had the chance to speak with one of the Berlino founders, Andrea D’Addio, about how he came from running a blog about Berlin to running a language school and how to improve your German learning experience.
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by Stella | People
Learning a new language might prove difficult, especially when this language is German; pronunciation, declension, past tenses to mention but a few. Granted, every language has its own difficulties and challenges. However, the most difficult part in learning a language is not coming in terms with the basic rules of grammar, syntax or vocabulary, but maintaining regular contact with it beyond the few hours one spends in a classroom weekly.
The traditional teaching method would expect the student to improve his language skills by discussing rather mundane and/or out of touch topics and doing grammar exercises off a textbook. While that can prove efficient to a certain extent -annoying as it is, learning a new language avoiding grammar is impossible- it does not bring one’s language skills to the next level. By “next level”, I refer to the level, where the student is not exclusively dependent on a traditional course and a teacher, but they integrate them organically as one of their many tools in their attempt to elevate their language level.
In order to bring our German language guides to the next level as well, we spoke with someone who is an expert on the topic. Sela is the founder of the language school Sprachsalon in Neukölln and has had her fair share of experience with learning and teaching languages. We sat down with her and discussed some advice on how to fine-tune your German skills.
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by Nikos | Stories
photo: Days of Deutsch
Actually fact is that you can easily get by in Berlin without any German. It has happened to me more than one time that I started speaking German in a cafe or restaurants only to be stared at blankly with the response of ‘Do you speak English?’. So why bother?
Because you are missing out on nuances of the German culture. As with every language, there are things that you can only express in German and any attempt of translation will lose the meaning immediately. Jokes are not funny anymore by the time somebody has translated them. Or take the word ‘Schadenfreude’ – so unique in its meaning that the word is now used worldwide in German and everybody understands what this means. So what is the best way to actually learn German, one of the most difficult languages to learn? Read more about our recommendations after the jump. Read on…
by Yoori | Stories
