my first Stammtisch

Last night I went with a friend from work to my first Stammtisch. This is a German word referring to a table at a bar or restaurant reserved for regulars, but it is also used to describe a conversation group for people who want to either practice or maintain a language. On Tuesday nights here there's a Stammtisch for people wanting to improve their German at a Cafe downtown, and yesterday I attended for the first time.

I was nervous about going because I wasn't sure that my German was good enough to actually carry on a conversation for a few hours, but I shouldn't have been. The group was led by a native German speaker, who is also a German teacher, and who does this out of the goodness of her heart from what I can tell, though perhaps also for the experience (she's pretty young). In addition to leading discussions and providing missing vocabulary and correcting grammar when requested, she also organized a game, something a bit Cranium-like, but homemade. We had to each make 5 or so cards with words on them, nouns, adjective, verbs, whatever, and then we had to roll a die to see how we had to get the others to guess the word on a card drawn at random. The methods of explication were: talking, drawing, drawing blindfolded, charades, or moulding out of clay. And since not all of these require actual speaking, you could participate even if your German wasn't so good.

And it was so much fun! There were 9 of us, three from France, one from Italy (my friend from work, Valentina), one from the Czech Republic, one from China, one from Kyrghystan, the German teacher, and me, from Canada of course. And I could surprisingly hold my own. It turns out that I'm able to understand German as spoken by not only German teachers, but also other foreigners. (Perhaps eventually I'll be able to understand actual Germans in normal speech, but I'm not quite there yet.) And I'm doing all right with the talking side of things, even if I don't always get the grammar right, and if my vocabulary is rather small. But it was really encouraging, and the teacher couldn't believe that I'd only been here since February. Hooray!

(I'm sorry that there aren't any pictures to go with this wordy post, but it was my first time with this group, and I didn't really want to start photographing them to post on the internet the first time that I'd met them, and become "that creepy Canadian girl with the camera".)