Is there still a German Thread?

[BeatrixBurgund]

We've moved back to Germany after 8 years in Switzerland and Scotland, and with the kids in school, I just know I'm going to have lots of questions about the Bavarian education system.

And I'd love to catch up with all the folk I used to chat with (even if I can't remember their usernames!). I'm on a namechange - it's MmeLindor here!

Kimmy thanks we definitely have organised the second one, I shall check on the first but OH's parents have been researching madly and organising so they may have covered that one already. I'll mention it to him to make sure.

Sadly not in Munich, no mrsd. Am in Bavaria though so in general know school system here.
Am in a book club with other women of different nationalities, am probably the only one who considers themselves an ex pat though. Take the kids to an ex pat English group. Work with seven women in a creche, five are German, get on with them/did works do/ am doing a couple of things outside of work. Thst said, Franconia is meant to be a lot more reserved than other Bundesländer.

Hello MrsDraper! Ive only visited Munich a few times but it's a gorgeous city and by all accounts great for families. Good that you have a relocation agent helping you, sure that will be invaluable. Re job hunting as the others have said, depending on your field/industry you could be ok with native English and basic German. You could also look at EuroLondon for jobs.

I've been here for 17 years and have only just made expat friends in the last four years since I've had kids! Before that I mainly had made friends through work and have a mixed bunch of German/immigrant background friends.

Anyone else off home for Christmas? We are flying tomorrow, can't wait to see my family!

Welshcake, thanks for the reply, hope you had a great Christmas.
Thanks for the tip about EuroLondon I will look into it
xx

Fröhes Neues! Hope you all had a 'gluten Rutsch' into 2017 and it's not too cold or snowy with you!

We're all gearing up for back to school on Monday - going to be a very long week I think!

We've had out appointment at the Ausländeramt and have submitted our citizenship application - hopefully just a wait for them to sort now..... still not 100% sure about what we should do, but trying to hedge all bets and keep all options open for as long as possible,

Anyway, best wishes to you all for 2017 and let's keep this thread going!

Ooh good luck dora! We also have school on Monday and work for me. DH has booked the day off but he was back last week, so I think he just wants a day of quiet :)

I managed to navigate the complicated differences between various after school care options and got DS into a club which is excellent and massively reduces my stress at work.

Argh just noticed dodgy autocorrect- Guten not gluten......

:o I was picturing some kind of delicious bread slide...

😂😂

Hello all, mind if I join you? I've been living in Bavaria for the last 6.5 years and would love to have a natter about life over here! How are you all getting on with your snow shoveling? We're in trouble with the neighbours 😂

mrsdraper I'm from Manchester too and work in Munich (currently on mat leave). I can understand your reservations about moving over, but there are so many positives. Munich is an amazing city and the quality of life is so much better over here, especially with children. I would never consider moving back home.

Regarding job hunting, there are lots of international companies in Munich that use English as their business language. Monster used to be quite good for job opportunities - maybe have a look on the website. Does your relocation agent also help with job hunting? If not I could pass you the name of a firm that could help - perhaps your husband's firm could pick up the cost if they've already offered other assistance?

Oops! We just about managed to avoid our turn on the rota because someone had cleared the path the day before and it didn't really need doing again until today and today it was somebody else's turn.

We are really lucky we have no footpath, I only have to clear our drive of snow which is a good work out. I hope it doesn't snow too much on Sunday as we are going to Phantasialand in Brühl to celebrate DD's 9th birthday it is over an hours drive but would rather not drive in heavy snow.

We live in a semi with half the frontage being our responsibility and the other the neighbour's. They take the matter super seriously though and are not impressed by our failure to be out shoveling snow at 6am (with a toddler and a newborn it just ain't going to happen!)

I spent the week ringing round trying to pay somebody to do it. But of course they're all fully booked as the Germans organise these things in the September before!

Bumping this up with more snow talk - I shovelled snow at 6:30am as I watched DD walk to the bus stop, do I get a gold Germanness star? :o At the weekend I stayed in bed til 10am and left DH to do it I'm not sure who will do it tomorrow if it snows overnight as we'll all be gone bay 6:45am, so far I think it hasn't actually snowed overnight when I've had an early shift, and if it does the snow may not get shovelled at all - will just have to put a lot of salt down tonight if its forecast!

I like 2 weeks of nice high play value snow and then I've had enough, cba to dig the car out every morning any more, the weather appears not to have got the message though.

I remember trying to snow shovel beside the road with a 2 year old "helping" and a 3 month old in a sling though - nearly impossible chloe - your neighbours probably think your DH should do it before he leaves for work though, I remember being told that although most people see it as Hausfrau work when there are no small babies.

I was trying to have a German MN name and a general one but appear incapable of such sophistication so I guess I'll just stick to this one!

I don't really have anything new to report. Our snow is just slushy and melty now but it's still freezing outside.

We still have lots of snow, only -15 this morning, my son has come down with a vomiting bug and my daughter has no school but has to do school work ( some kind of staff and PTA meeting for the school, my Dh is taking part) , it is going to be a long day. At least we do not have to leave the house.

So my stepdad had a heart attack and had to resuscitated yesterday, doesn't look he has long, feel so bad for being so far away, I doubt I can get back to Australia would have to take the kids so expensive. Sorry needed to share with someone. Having kids it has made it so much harder to be so far away.

So sorry about your stepdad goodie this is totally the worst thing about being so far away. I hope he is recovering, sending you lots of love and best wishes.

Sorry to hear about your stepdad goodie

Has anyone on here done a Goethe Institut on-line course? Am pondering doing one to get my written German up to B2 standard, but when I tried to register for the grading test their website crashed which didn't fill me with confidence!

I want to do an Ausbilding (despite being ancient - it appears to be perfectly acceptable to do an apprenticeship in your 40s...) for which I need a B2 certificate, and when I took my Deutsch-Test für Zuwanderer my written German was only just B1 standard... A regular German class is out of the question though as I am working morning shifts in a care home atm which are different days every week, as well as teaching a couple of evening classes and having the kids to juggle in the afternoons, so it will have to be an online course...

Goethe are very respectable I believe but I'd love a recommendation to be more confident I wouldn't be flushing 500€ plus down the toilet, esp given their website seems glitchy today!

Thanks Welsh a 5 more, my stepdad is a bit better today but we will have to wait and see,

Getting really annoyed with the ridiculous expectations for making your communion, I feel they should either have classes after school or after church all these projects, special masses, my DD refused to sit with the other Communion children today at mass because she was sure they would make her get up and sing on the altar she said she would make an idiot of herself, her problem I get that but she cried her eyes out and we ended up missing mass. Three different churches we have to attend in the next few weeks why we cant just attend the main Parish church i don't know. making my communion in Australia was much more simple.

Hallo ihr alle!

am having a (nice) little wave of nostalgia for Vienna since am hoping to apply to the uni for my masters - would love to live there again!

Goodie - really sorry to hear that. Feels so unfair when there are barriers in the way of important things like this. Please don't feel bad though.

5more - I did a 3 week or so Intensivkurs at the Uni Wien before I started my Erasmus term there. Maybe you could look for something like that, since it's probably bound to be a good course if it's accredited by a uni. Mine was ok, but I've never learned well in a classroom.
To be honest, I learnt most when I had to cram for exams in German at the end of that term and that involved taking lengthy typed-out notes from longer articles I was really interested in.
When people said reading was the best way to improve a language, I just thought well clearly they don't know what it's like to have time constraints, cos it takes me so much time and exhausting concentration to read 2 pages of something that's not Harry Potter, I'm never going to get anywhere with just reading.
With this method - sitting down with a PDF article on one side of the screen, blank word doc on the other, and literally typing out huge blocks of text (not even really looking up many of the words I didn't know, or worrying if I didn't understand some tricky sentence as I typed) - my grasp of the language just grew in a way I wouldn't at all have expected. Literally quasi-passive learning. I just tried this in desperation because I left revising to the last minute. I used to get up early with a red bull and it was quite exhilerating really, typing out all this German such a nerd then when I came back to England, all these phrases had somehow unexpectedly stuck in my mind and were coming out in essays and my grade went up by 2 classifications which was a very welcome miracle
(It's also brilliant for understanding and getting used to grammar - when you see the same patterns repeated across different articles (and in this method you can cover a lot more ground), you start to use good formulations automatically.)
Depends on your learning style of course. If you're like me and are helped by having your hands occupied during hyperfocus on something that requires a lot of concentration, it could work? Specially since it's not like a course that takes place a specific time twice a week.

Sorry for the essay! goodness me
Just to add: I think the Goethe tests are very expensive (unless the course you're looking at includes the test + Zeugnis at the end?) & may not include price of course materials which you must buy - I'd try to do the bulk myself and then maybe pay someone a bit per week for an hour of conversation (did this for my A levels).
FYI as a reference point my intensive course was around 360€, course materials around €35 and that was around 45 hours of teaching in a small class.

Hi Linzer, I'm in Vienna, been here almost 20 years.

Anyone else in Austria?!

Thanks velour - it's really just my written German that is the issue; I have to speak German all the time so I really don't need to pay anyone for conversation practice... I resent reading for "pleasure" in German because I'd so very much rather read in English I don't actually enjoy learning languages at all, it's just a practical necessity... I do learn when I have to read stupid policies and procedures etc for work but tend to look up words so all I learn are Fachwörter...

Going by your method I will get up to speed by actually going ahead and doing the Ausbildung, But catch 22 requires non native speakers to have the certificate before starting.

The Goethe classroom intensive course would be 1170€ for 17 days, which is both too much and logistically impossible... The 500€ ish is online Schriftlich only but does include materials... I do feel that I need instruction as I haven't really ever been taught German aside from dropping in and out of a couple of VHS courses...

Hmmm

Good luck with the masters!

Oh I see re: speaking. You're lucky! What kind of work do you do?
I don't have a particular talent learning languages, just see it as something that happens to me...was a TCK & just muddle through it all.

Am completely at the cost of classroom course! They're definitely cashing in on the name there.
I would go for the cheapest certificate available which is also universally recognised (e.g. just the test - well under 200€ I would have thought, here in Paris at Goethe it's 140€), and do the bulk of the work yourself.

You could also maybe volunteer as a helper in a German school if any time free and listen to the lessons I did this for a few days at a Bavarian Förderschule as a teenager and learned some things in literacy classes, was great!

Thank you! Can't wait to be at uni again. If it's with a view of the Votivkirche, even better.