Deutsche Musik ♪

Okay. First of all, as I said on my last post, my German sucks so I don't even know if the title of the post is well written. :/

But anyways, I never said this but I love music. I mean, I'm not a musician or anything but I just love listening to it! I also love foreign languages. So what can be better than listening to music in other languages? :D

Here's my first look into German music:

The song's called 'Symphonie' by Silbermond, a German band. I've heard some other songs by them but this one's my favorite so I posted it. I wanted to post the official video of the song, but I couldn't find it. :/

So, as my poor German slowly improves, I start to understand some words, even some sentences! :D But here you can find the lyrics with transaltion.

It was a short post, but I hope you enjoyed the song. :)

Die - Das - Der ?

Deutsch. Alemán. Alemão. Allemand. Tyska. Whatever they call it in your language it means the same: German: a really beautiful language spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, etc. And a really difficult language to learn! At least that's my opinion. I've been learning it for about 4 months by myself on Livemocha, and I feel like I've learned nothing! I'm not going to say it's one of the most difficult languages on Earth, because it's not. Not even close. And I can tell you that because I'm a big fan of languages. I've tried to learn Swedish (not easy) and Russian, which is a really complicated language. Not to mention Arabic with the whole different alphabet in which letters change depending on where they are located in a word. So yeah, I could say it's one of the easiest languages compared to others; it has the same alphabet as Spanish and English, it has the same roots as English, some words are almost identical in English! But it's not that easy; it has 3 different articles, because there are 3 different genders for the words: masculine (der), feminine (die), and neutral (das), which makes it even more complicated. I can speak fluently only 2 languages: Spanish and English. In English, it's really easy because there's only one article (the) that is applied for every word, no matter what the gender is (the girl, the boy). In Spanish it's not that complicated either; there are 2 articles for 2 genders: masculine (el) and feminine (la). And it's really easy to know what gender goes for each word since most of the words that end up on 'a' are feminine, and the rest are masculine (la niña, el niño). Of course there are some exceptions. But in German there's no way to know what the gender of a word is! (as far as I know) For example you can say der Junge (the boy). As he's a boy it's pretty obvious that you need to use 'der' since it's masculine. If you're talking about a woman then you say die Frau, so there you're using 'die' which is feminine. But when it comes to talking about a girl then you have to say das Mädchen in which 'das' is the neutral article, so after thinking about it for a loong time I decided to stop questioning why it was das Mädchen and not die Mädchen. And that's just an example! I'm really trying to learn each word with its gender, so I can use it in a sentence, but my memory it's not that powerful!

Then, when you use adjectives to describe a word, its ending changes depending on the gender of the word. i.e. Adjective: jung. Der junger Mann (the young man), die junge Frau (the young woman).

And now the hardest part! :P The article might change depending on where it's located in a sentence, like for example: Sie gibt dem Mann einen Brief. (She gives the man a letter.) The noun article der changes into dativ (dem) and ein into akkusativ (einen). Don't ask why because I still don't understand. :/

Good news is that I was talking with Victor (a friend who's also going to D1840) and he told me that we'll have a German course when we're in Germany.. so I think it won't be that bad.

On another matter..

MY PAPERS WERE ACCEPTED IN THE EMBASSY! :D So that means I got my Visa.. or I'll get it. They told me to pick it up on the 2nd week of August! That's one step closer to Germany! I need now to buy the plane tickets, but I'm going to wait until the last week of July, because it'll be cheaper then (according to the travel agents).

Until then..

Bis dann! :)

"Getting there means leaving things behind"

I just wanted to share this with all of you. Right after I wrote my last post this morning, I was listening to music and a song came on my iPod. It's called "Starts With Goodbye" by Carrie Underwood. I love that song, and I know the lyrics by heart, but to be honest I had never payed much attention to them.. until today. It was really weird, because as I said, I heard it like 5 minutes after I published the post, and what I had wrote was still on my mind, and well for all of those who haven't heard the song, it described pretty much how I felt when I wrote my post! Of course it was in a more poetic way, but it was still what I was thinking! (except for the beginning of the song.)

So I invite you to listen to the song and read the lyrics:

"WHAT the hell am I doing!?" D:

Those words have been floating in my head for the past few days. I've heard it's common in almost every exchange student to feel this way just a few weeks before leaving, and I knew this would happen, but it's just starting to sink in that I'm actually leaving. It's not a dream anymore, it's not a fantasy, it's not just something I would love to do: it's something I'm about to do. It's called pre-homesickness. I haven't even left and I'm already thinking about how much I'm going to miss: my family, my friends, even this big, crowded, polluted and beautiful city I live in. I'll miss the weather, the language, the FOOD! Well, if I continue on how many things I'm going to miss, then this post would be neverending.

So the real question would be: Is it really worth it? I mean leaving EVERYTHING I know and care about to set off on an adventure that I don't really know how's it going to turn out, and that probably's going to change my person, character etc.? 90% of the times I've asked myself this question my answer had been YES. Yes, it's worth it because I'll learn a new language, get to know another culture, meet new people, and it'll help me mature and grow as a person.

Sometimes my answer's NO. And along with that answer comes a loooong list of fears. I fear my host-families not liking me. I fear not being able to adapt to my life in Germany. I fear being homesick and missing my family too much, since the longest I've ever been apart from them was only 1 week! I fear not learning the language quickly and failing at school. Which takes me to my biggest fear: SCHOOL. I've always been in the same school, since kindergarden! My classmates have been the same in the last 13 years. The same goes for my friends. I've been living in this little bubble for my whole life, and to be honest I couldn't wait to get out of it. But, at the same time I'm scared! I'm scared that I won't have any friends in Germany, at least in the first few months, because I SUCK at starting conversations. First day of school scares the hell out of me! D: I don't know what I'm going to do, who am I going to talk to, etc. I'm scared of leaving my comfort zone and going somewhere where nobody knows anything about me. But that's one of the reasons I decided to go on exchange, to actually open myself to people, become more social, etc.

So to everyone who's reading this and planning to go on exchange in future years: get ready to feel this way. It's common, but it's not pleasant.