#teachingisfun

As you may remember, I started my Writing Course in German in February, 2023. This is a custom-made course with an experienced German teacher trainer.

Every week we have live sessions (3-5 hours) plus I have lots of homework. The course is demanding , but I can see amazing results!

The main reason for taking this course was that I have totally different perceptions when it comes to writing in other languages. For example, when I write in English, it is easier. Yet it is more challenging in Spanish and even more challenging in German.

Before the course, I set some goals:

• to improve the usage of transition words;
• vocabulary (I’d like to use more advanced words);
  
• write longer texts;
• get rid of using anglicisms. Honestly, I hate when people use anglicism as, in my opinion, anglicisms ruin the beauty of languages. Don’t you agree?
• learn how to describe pictures more efficiently (for SEO purposes, I must write Alt text, caption, and description). My German trainer also prepares people for international German exams, and one of the tasks that people must do is to describe pictures well. So, my trainer is a pro at describing pictures.

Today, I’d like to share

my intermediate takeaways and some interesting self-observations:

1) I’ve noticed that I struggle with the layout of the German keyboard. I know it’s weird. I’ve got no problems not only with writing by hand but also with retyping texts. So, I started working on this issue on my cell phone. It took me a month and a bit to get used to the German keyboard. Currently, I am working on using the German keyboard on my laptop. However, there are no typed German letters on the keyboard. Probably, I will buy the stickers on Amazon or create a few by myself and glue them onto my English keyboard. I am a visual person, and that’s why I strongly believe that seeing the letters will help me.

2) I have different ways of thinking in other languages. Writing texts for this blog in German gives me lots of opportunities to see the text from a different angle. For example, when my text is ready in English and Spanish and then I translate it into German, oftentimes, I come up with new ideas and editing suggestions.

3) I came up with the new idea of color-coding. My German trainer and I work on my texts in shared Google Documents. So, in order to eliminate the number of comments, I created a new system for color-coding for both of us.

Yellow — for correcting grammar;
Pink — transition words (it helps me to count them at the end, plus see where I can add more of them);
Green — vocabulary (just in case there could be a better word);
Blue — something to think about for the future.

All in all,

This writing course gives me a whole new perspective on writing texts about my blog. In addition to that, it is fun to write and translate my blog posts for foreign language teachers 😃