questions i've been asked recently, part iii: what i say and what i mean

How was your trip?
what i say: "it was great!"
what i mean: "it was not a trip. it was home. it was my life for an entire year. it was not a trip. why are you saying it's a trip."
"oh wait, i'm probably overreacting to this."
"i'm sorry."
"well, anyway, it was fantastic."

Do you miss Switzerland?
what i say: "yes. so much."
(and then i laugh and change the subject.)
what i mean: "there are no words to describe it. there aren't. and i miss it and i don't want to miss it because it hurts so much and so i'm dealing with this by not talking about it so let's not talk about it."
"except i do. want to talk about it, i mean."
"i just, i'm not sure if you're okay with me melting into a puddle right here."

tell me something about your exchange year!
what i say: (laughing) "gosh, where to start... what do you want to know about?"
what i mean: "ahhhhh you are amazing."
"wait. do you actually want to hear all this?"
"are you sure?"
"are you really really sure?"
 "...and do you have seven hours to spend listening to me ramble?"

why didn't you respond to my emails/letters/texts?
what i say: "um."
what i mean: "gahhhhhh I AM SO SORRY. seriously, i am the worst long-distance communicator in the history of ever. this does not mean that you don't matter-- on the contrary, it means that you matter very much (because i'm talking to you now) and that once again i've proven my ability to lose contact with multiple people in a very short time. i'm really, really sorry and i love you very much. let's have a conversation right now."

I speak German too!
what i say: "that's awesome! where did you learn it?"
what i mean: "you are now my new favorite person. can we go talk in a corner? or actually can you just speak german to me for the next three days because i miss the sound of this language so much and i'm super afraid of losing it forever and i'm resorting to children's cartoons on youtube JUST so i can hear german again..."

::sighs:: ah, Switzerland. the most beautiful place in the world, isn't it?
what i say: "yes."
"yes it is."
what i mean: "yes."
"yes it is."

days > 365 -- blooming

advice for future exchange students #29:

take time to bloom.

seriously. do what makes you happy,

but most importantly,

do what makes you grow and learn and change.

that's what matters.

(yes, i'm skipping ahead about 100 days from my most recent countdown update. explanation below.)

the last 100 days of my exchange were amazing... and i decided to prioritize enjoying my exchange, making memories, spending time with the people i care about, etc. which means that i neglected my blog.
for those of you who keep track of me via this blog, i'm really sorry-- but i did have amazing and wonderful experiences and i WILL share them! only, not exactly in real time. ;)

the sharp pain of goodbyes IS a real thing, and reverse culture shock is ALSO totally a real thing, and secondhomesickness/hostsickness is also a VERY. REAL. THING. but i'm learning, and i'm changing, and i like to believe that this is helping me to grow up. to "bloom", if you want to be super cheesy.

so, here's what Hannah has been doing in the past no-longer-blogging-days: (not chronologically)

• came home.
• said a lot of tearful goodbyes. my class, my families, my friends... i'm awful at goodbyes and prolonging them over a few weeks was not the best way to go. also, i cried for one and a half hours in my first flight to the US.
• saw The Fault In Our Stars in German. still have not seen it in english... hmmm...
• dreamed and is dreaming in Swiss German. still. :/
• went to summer camp.
• celebrated my bestie's birthday.
• went on a camping trip with my family (a very long one) and realized just how unused i am to road trips. TWO HOURS in the car?!? WHAT???
• went on an extended-family vacation at the beach. Oregon Coast, i have missed you.
• spoke Swiss German (hooray!) with the conference speaker at our beach vacation center. it blessed me so much and made me ridiculously happy. 
• went to my first American Rotary meeting in a year. it was amazing to realize just how much people in this group have invested in me and my exchange, and to get a chance to thank them for that. Rotary has problems sometimes, yes, but overall, it basically rocks.
• speaking of Rotary, our Rebound (returning exchange student) weekend finished today! I can't believe how much we've changed in the past year, and how much all of us have learned. it's probably one of the weirdest and yet most amazing shifts i've ever seen.
• and this year no longer terrifies me or worries me as much as it used to. because i am realizing how much more i am capable of.

that's it for now!

love love love,

hannah

i am in love

note: the following post was written about a month ago in the train, but i didn't actually get around to posting it until just now. 

it's very short and also unedited, so just consider it a snapshot of my feelings at the moment.

I'm in the Gotthard Tunnel on a very long train ride, and I'm riding alone so I have plenty to write in my journal and plenty of time to do it. it's the nice thing about trains, the ability to always write and to lose yourself in writing. it's different from a plane or a bus or a car or really anything else. 

and i just realized something-- I am in love with the trains. 

I am in love with German and Italian and French. I am in love with chocolate and cheese and traveling and multilingual greetings and watches and history and snow. I am in love with strong mountains, fields that never end, villages nestled deep in valleys and streams bluer than the sky in summer. 

it's just wonderful, beautiful, and I realize that what I am really in love with is Switzerland. 

I am in love with this country.
and a part of my heart will always be here,
because Switzerland has changed me. 

and I don't want my old life back.

days > 210 -- speaking

piece of advice for exchange students #25:

one day, you will wake up and find 

that you have gained more than simply the ability 

to communicate in another language.

you have gained the ability to make yourself heard.

a couple of instances (all right, more than a couple) in the past couple days have brought me to the realization that I am capable of much more than I think, communication-wise.

this doesn't mean that i am native-fluent-level in the language, as much as i wish :( but i am able to communicate my feelings and my thoughts and my ideas in German and in Swiss German. and while it is still an enormous challenge, i can do it. i can speak my own words in my own voice in another language. i can make myself heard.

things i've done in the past 10-ish days (the past meaning before 20 days... again, i'm still working on updating this blog in a timely fashion):

• found out that my artwork (a school project) was one of a few nominated for an international comics festival contest. so that was exciting.
• got published in my school's newspaper! i'm actually super happy about this, although it was rather embarrassing when the paper first came out. my piece was originally written in german literature class when my teacher had to find something for me to do... it describes my life at the beginning of my exchange and my feelings both before and after the first three months. and my german teacher wanted to print it in the paper!
• went to Neuchatel (french part) and explored a castle with my friend James. also we played chess.
• I CUT MY OWN HAIR.
• and it wasn't actually that bad!
• survived the week before vacations. it involved a presentation and four tests. oh, and speaking of the presentation...
• ... I mentioned this briefly in my last update, but I successfully made a presentation with my friend in music class. it involved a demonstration, a powerpoint, several printout sheets, and an oral part of about 10 minutes... not that big of a deal for me in English, but HUGE in German. I'm exceedingly proud of myself for writing it (although really, he did all the editing of my horrible German grammar, so he's the one who should feel truly proud haha.)
• i also received the compliment of my life when he told me I should stop using the internet to translate because my German was better than Google's. day. made.
• (okay, so I'm not absolutely sure if that's true or not. but it still made me happy.)

en fin :)

hannah

days > 200 -- comparing

piece of advice for future exchange students #24:

you'll come at some point to the realization

that your host country is not perfect.

in fact, it's pretty flawed.

but guess what?

that's okay.

so another of the things that i've been realizing in the past two months:

swiss culture can really bother me.

american culture can really bother me, too.

and you know what?
that's fine.

there are things that i can appreciate about both cultures, and there are things that i don't. and being open-minded does not mean i have to agree with everyone... it simply means that i can learn to learn from both.

things i've done in the past 10 days:

• took a french test and got a 2,9 (basically the equivalent of a D?) on it. i am ridiculously proud of myself haha.*
• went to the Cailler chocolate factory. Yay for chocolate. And friends. And Sarah's mom (okay, sorry, that was a really random inside joke). But definitely for chocolate.
• successfully wrote a presentation in GERMAN about the European crossflute. It was less of a flop than I thought it would be (probably due to the helpful editing of my project partner...) and I was extremely surprised to find that I can write a lot more in German than I thought I could.
• took a german literature test with my class and scored above a C ... better than the average! i'm actually super proud of this too. (and yes, my standards may have slipped a bit... but it's in GERMAN okay?)
• found that my swiss mum has more rules than i am used to. they're not bad, they're just different, and it's taken me a while to get used to the swiss cultural part of this.
• ignored about a dozen people who keep asking me where i'm from, no matter how many times i say the USA. YESIKNOWILOOKASIANBUTIAMALSOAMERICANNOWLEAVEMEALONEPLEASE.
• Luzerner Fasnacht! It's known for having parades and being louder and less organized than Basler Fasnacht, plus it's pretty fun.
• came to the realization that my chocolate tolerance is extremely high. i'm not going to tell you how much chocolate i bought and ate in a period of six hours, but i will say that it's probably not extremely healthy. ooops.
• spent some time getting to know the people on exchange who I DON'T hang out with very often. I'd love to talk to them more, it's just that we don't see each other very much. but I crashed at Evan's house in Luzern, and I had some fun/deep talks, and it was just pleasant to be free for a bit.
• saw Fribourg with Ryan. it was my first time ever in Fribourg and it was beautiful.
• went to a Heimatabend [traditional celebration in middleswitzerland, with singing and dancing and a play in Swiss German] and spent the night at my friend Maddie's house. that was also lovely :)

the end!

hannah

*that's because my french class is 5th-7th year french, plus is being taught in french, and i've had absolutely no french whatsoever before coming here. so it makes me proud :P

5 languages I'd love to learn in the next 5 years

You can survive in Switzerland without German.

It's true. If you speak English, you will almost always be sufficiently equipped for casual and tourist and even some school situations. Knowing the language is not necessary.

But it enriches life. I can't explain how happy I am that I'm learning German, simply because it gives me so many more opportunities. I don't just learn about the language, but about the people and the values and the culture of my host country.

And the more that I practice my German and Swiss German, the more I want to learn. Not only more about the German language or the English language (that too), but about new languages, new cultures. In only 6 months, I've reached conversational fluency* in two languages... and with work and practice, absolutely anyone can do the same thing! Isn't that amazing?

So with that in mind, here are the top 5 languages I'd like to learn in the next 5 years:

1. French. because it is lovely. also because I just want to be able to speak fluent French. in the next 5 years, I PROMISE myself that I will get to conversational fluency in French. 
2. Mandarin Chinese. because I want to be able to speak the language of my country of origin, and also because apparently it’s one of the hardest languages for English speakers and I might as well take the opportunity given to me by birth.
3. Portuguese. because it is quite possibly the most beautiful language ever.
4. Spanish. technically I’ve already worked to learn this one but I want to be fluent, or at least conversationally so. also it is one of the most useful languages to have in the US.
5. Romanian. because while I’d like to learn Latin, it really doesn’t help that much (no one speaks full Latin) and people do speak Romanian which is 80% Latin anyhow.

(and some languages that almost made the list)

• Italian. because who doesn’t dream of speaking fluent Italian, I mean really. it’s like almost more like singing instead of talking, plus you get to wave your arms around and shout at people and no one takes it personally or gets offended. 
• Afrikaans. because why not. it's one of the newest languages in the world and yet the fourth most spoken Germanic language (after English, German, and Dutch). Also, it's said to be one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. "Easiest", of course, relatively speaking...
• Icelandic. just because secretly I've always wanted to be an Inkling (or a Coalbiter).

*note: conversational fluency to me means three things: a) i can successfully get my point across without translating every word in my head first and b) i can understand basically everything the other person says in a normal conversation, and they can understand me and c) the language becomes a default for me (i.e. I exclaim spontaneous things in german and swiss german, often without thinking). I believe I'm past this point, but I'm not very close to native fluency :(

days > 160 -- continuing

piece of advice for future exchange students #20:

sometimes your life will change.

a lot.

deal with it.

as you read in the last update, I recently changed host families. for various different reasons, it hasn't been a very easy switch... add that to the fact that school started two days after i moved and the fact that semester is ending AND the fact that i need to pay for trips and book my flight back and coordinate with my other host families, and you get one extremely stressed-out Hannah.

so the past couple days have been a lot of "Hannah pull yourself together and get on with your life" and part of that includes getting on with my overdue blogging. 

::sigh::

here goes...

things i've done in the past 10ish days:

• finished my first two weeks with my new host family!
• successfully lived vegetarian
• (okay, i guess i should explain that last part.) for those of you who know me, you probably know that i like eating meat. and that i am not really a vegetarian type of person. BUT my new host mom is vegetarian and so I haven't eaten chicken or steak or ribs or any sort of meat besides lunch meat in the past one and a half weeks. yes, i know that's not super long. but it surprised me (in a good way).
• celebrated one of my friend's (Faith's) birthdays. All of us went to her house and had a sleepover. It was fun.
• said goodbye to the oldies. i miss them already. :(
• didn't do any traveling for a first time in a while... this was really really weird for me, actually. Normally I spend at least one day a week traveling through Switzerland, but my new host mom isn't super happy about that so I guess I'll be keeping my travel to a minimum here. :/
• met up with some exchange students and explored Basel. so that was fun.
• went to a Rotary meeting and met some more people. Every time I go, everyone continues to praise my German and say I'm so talented... while this might not exactly be true, it's nice for my self esteem haha.
• got our newbies!! ahhhh! we are now all oldie exchangers. 
• watched Frozen with my little sister (from my first family).
• actually, that was probably the best part of my entire 10 days.
• also, i hung out with my old family. who i miss. a lot. <3

byeeeeee!

hannah

on the seventh day of christmas

on the seventh day of christmas

 my exchange gave to me
seven for a family
six lovely months
five languages

four advent days

three families

two traditions

and a new look at bloomability

so this is possibly one of the few things that has made my exchange what it is, and how amazing it is... it's a quick blog post and a long story.

you see, when i first met all these people, we were in a new country, learning a new language, meeting new families and friends. and to be honest, we aren't really that much alike. we clashed personality-wise and culture-wise and everything. i thought i would never, ever belong to this group, and i wasn't at all sure that i wanted to.

but you know what?

i was wrong. 

and i'm so glad that i was.

today, these seven people make up the rest of my exchanger family. we've gone through a lot, and it hasn't been all that easy, but we share a bond that not everyone is lucky enough to have. it's amazing to me, to realize that i've only known these people for a few months, and yet i have changed so much and they have changed so much, and i can't imagine never seeing them again.

and we are an exchange family.

we are a complicated,

oddly-grouped,

never-could-be-guessed,

beautiful family.

on the fifth day of christmas

on the fifth day of christmas

 my exchange gave to me
five languages

four advent days

three families

two traditions

and a new look at bloomability

what you may not have known about Switzerland:

it has four official languages.

None of these languages are English. Instead, they are German, French, Italian, and Rato-Romansh. However, since English has become the "universal language", many things have translations in English as well. This, together with the fact that Switzerland is in the middle of Europe, means that when people sing Christmas songs, they tend to sing them in multiple different languages... my choir sang three songs in Italian, two in English, one in French, one in Finnish, two in Latin, and the rest in German. (Romansh songs are not popular, probably because only like 5% of the Swiss population actually speaks it...)

Every time I hear Christmas songs, then, I'm reminded that I am in another country. another continent.

but sometimes, that's nice to be reminded of.

days > 120 -- familiarizing

advice for future exchange students #17:

you will eventually get to the point where you feel that you belong,

that this is your normal life,

but that point comes mostly when you belong in your group of friends.

I came to a funny conclusion the other day.

I have a very strange collection of various acquaintances and friend groups.

There is my Swiss class friends, and my exchange student friends here, and my exchange student friends at home, and the elderly people who are in my choir, and my debate friends and my church friends and my youth group friends and my siblings and the people who have known me forever.

it's a rather surprising mix. in fact, if you think about it, a lot of my friends would not get along with each other very well.

but the more types of people i meet,

the more i realize that they are just that... people. 

and that we all look to connect with each other.

things that have happened in the past 10-ish days:

• the upperlevel classes of Gymnasium are taking Matura this week, so all of our classes looked slightly different. This means that we ended up watching Pitch Perfect and Les Mis in class. It was cool.
• Also I ate "Asian food" in Basel, Switzerland.
• It was pretty awful, unfortunately. someone please send me the Portland foodcarts? I will love you forever and ever if you do.
• The days come and I'm realizing that our newbies are coming soon. Which also makes me realize that I have a little over half my exchange left. I'm still not exactly sure where the rest of it went.
• Rotary Christmas Dinner was lovely! I heard a blind singer and a lot of very classical music... but it wasn't bad, and it was nice to meet all the Rotarians :) Plus I have a new counselor who I happened to meet as well.
• I've gotten the opportunity to read some German books from my library... and guess what, I can understand them! But really, books exercise a completely different sort of vocabulary than speaking in normal conversation, so it's been good for me to read.
• I am writing in German. As you can see here. It's far from perfect, but it's a huge jump from what I could do three or four months ago (read: nothing). Also, ich bin stolz auf mich :)

and that's all for right now...

tschüss!!

my life in switzerland -- a german post!

So I wrote something in german while the rest of my class was writing essays...

I'd say that this is a pretty good indicator of my somewhat lacking German skills. (German speaking friends, please feel free to edit this.)

Anyway. Here you go. (And yes, I'll be posting the translation sometime afterwards... but I wrote this in German and so I have to rewrite it in English to post a translation.)

---

Als ich erst hier gekommen war, habe ich mich sechsmal in zwei Wochen im Bad eingeschlossen.

Alles war fremd... alles, von die Supermärkte zu die Kirchen zu die Fahrpläne, war anders als in Amerika. Ich fühlte mich, als ob alles waren speziell gemacht, um Ausländer zu verwirren. Und vielleicht das stimmt.

Das erste Ding war die Sprache.

Viele Leute haben gesagt, dass Deutsch eine einfache Sprache zu lernen ist. Leider, viele von diese Leute haben Deutsch nie gesprochen. Deutsch hat Aussprache, wer English-sprechende Leute brauchen nicht, und umgekehrt. Die Grammatik ist anders. Und die Artikeln. Und die Präpositionen. Und die Wörter.

Am Anfang habe ich viel gelernt. Ich habe immer Sprachen gern gehabt... aber Deutsch ist nicht wie Spanisch, oder Chinesisch, oder Lateinisch. Und nach den ersten Wochen, habe ich nicht so viel gelernt, weil es war schwieriger.

Es ist immer noch schwierig, und ich muss es jeden Tag schreiben und lesen und sprechen. Jetzt denke ich in Deutsch, aber es immer besser in meinem Gehirn ist, als wenn ich sprechen oder schreiben will.

Das zweite Ding war die Kultur.

Ob man möchtest, extrem peinlich zu sein, 24/7, für die nächste Jahr von sein Leben... er soll ein Austauschjahr machen. Eben, die einfachste Aufgaben waren schwierig zu verstehen, schwieriger zu erklären, und noch schwieriger zu machen. Ich habe immer das Gefühl gehabt, dass all die andere Leute lachen wurden, bei der Amerikanerin, wer nicht wusste, wie man die Bus-Tür öffnet.

Zum Beispiel, Schweizerzeit ist anders als Amerikanerzeit. Der Bus wartet nur eine Minute für eine Haltestelle. Die Züge kommen immer pünktlich (oder wenn nicht, sie sagen das an der Fahrplanschild).

Und noch mehr: Man sagt immer „En Guete“ vor essen. Wenn man zu einer Party kommt, er muss immer alle Leute grüßen. Man liest, schreibt, und spricht Hochdeutsch in der Schule und in formal Beruf, aber spricht Schweizerdeutsch mit Freunden, Familie, und in den Supermärkte.

Und das letzte Ding waren die Menschen.

Meine Klasse ist die beste Klasse der ganze FMS, und der ganze Welt. Aber am Anfang... Sie waren freundlich und nett, klar, aber ich habe immer das Gefühl, dass ich nicht wirklich ein Teil von der Klasse war. Dass ich „die Austauschschülerin“ war. Anders.

Aber wirklich, es war hart. Normalerweise bin ich die erste in meiner Klasse und immer in die Mitte meinen Freunden und Freundinnen. Hier... nicht.

Eine Nebeneffekt, der als peinlich, allein am meisten von der Zeit zu sein. Und so war es, so war es für ein oder zwei Monate oder so.

Und dann etwas ist geändert.

Ich weiß nicht was. Vielleicht es war Deutsch, oder Schweizerdeutsch, oder einfach Zeit. Aber jetzt fühle ich mich wie ein Mädchen wer in der Schule geht, ein Mädchen wer in die Schweiz ist, ein Mädchen wer gehört in meiner Klasse. Denke ich, vielleicht jetzt ich beginne zu gehören.J

Und vielleicht beginne ich zu gehören. Hier.

Und raten Sie was?

Ich habe mich nie mehr im Bad eingeschlossen.

---

language update: stalling

so I have a confession to make.

In the past couple weeks, I haven't really been trying.

But wait, this story has more to it...

---

You see, I've always been fairly good at languages. They've never been a struggle for me to learn, at least not to the point that I know they are for some people. In general, I can listen and mimic the sounds around me without too much effort, and the grammatical structure of the language makes intuitive sense to me. Something about languages seems to "click" in my head, faster than it does for science or math or computers or history or any other sort of subject.

This does not mean that I am perfect-- trust me, I have TONS to learn and my German is still pretty bad-- but it does mean that in general, both because I work hard and because I genuinely like languages, the learning curve is not quite as steep for me as it could be.

---

So in the first 6 weeks or so, I was at the "conversational exchange student" level. This means different things to different people, but what I mean by it is that I could say normal everyday things regularly and carry on everyday conversations. By the end of my two-month, I could figure out what the teachers were telling me and what to do. (I was still a lot slower than the rest of my class, but I could do the work and take the tests and everything. I've been taking tests with my class since day 2, so...) I could also ask for help, get directions from someone, and in general function as a normal person.
This doesn't mean that my German is native-level fluent. My grammar is pretty horrible, because I can never remember the articles to anything or the preterit form of verbs. But in general I had a non-distinguishable accent and I could communicate almost everything I wanted to say.

---

That's when the learning speed started to slow down. For the first 6 weeks, I felt like I was getting better every day, that I was learning more and becoming better at expressing myself in tangible ways. But for some reason, once I hit the two month mark, my German just sort of appeared to stay the same.

I'm not exactly sure why this was. My guess, though, is that after reaching the point where I could express myself, I stopped trying so hard. People can understand me, I can communicate, and in general my teachers are impressed that I've learned so much German in such a short time. My language level is almost the same as some of the Januaries in my area. Why would I need to learn anything more?

I did try to learn Swiss German in the meantime, and that helped a lot. For the past month or so, I've been asking my host family to speak Swiss German with me. I can understand almost everything now, and speak a little. But... and this is a big But... my German, both Swiss German and High German, is far from perfect.

---

So what I did then?

Well. I'm not particularly proud of it. But for the next two weeks I started to have an irrational fear of losing my English. I holed up in my room and read English online books, checked Facebook statuses. I hung out more with the other exchange students, and we speak English together because not all of us are comfortable with speaking German. English is easier. I stopped studying German outside of school and homework.

Granted, I'm still studying German automatically every time I turn on the television or read the newspaper or do my homework here. It's something I have to do, because I don't ask my family or classmates to speak English. 

But I wasn't studying grammar, or vocabulary, or sentence structure. It wasn't fun and interesting to do anymore, simply because I could already function in my host language. 

And so I fell into a sort of language slump. 

---

Please don't think that I'm giving up on my exchange... I love Switzerland just as much as ever, and I'm making new efforts to learn the language... but I think it's important for me to talk about mistakes on this blog too, because goodness knows they're a huge part of exchange.

and that is all for now, folks.

byyeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! :)

hannah

(p.s. I think you should know that I am now going through my language books and studying German with all I've got. And I'm learning grammar. So be proud of me. thatsallbye.)

days > 80 -- becoming

advice for future exchange students #14:

work on the same things as your peers in your host country.

if they take tests, try to take tests. if they take notes in class, try to take notes 

(even when you have no idea what's going on.)

in other words: try to adapt. try to live the same life 

that you would if you were a teen who'd grown up in your host country. 

it helps.

The days are going by so fast. I can't believe it's been almost three months since my arrival in Switzerland. One of the oldies [translation: exchange-student speak for the students who came half a year before you. If you're from the Northern Hemisphere, like me, these are some of the inbounds from South America and all the inbounds from New Zealand and Australia who came in January] mentioned that our newbies were coming in about three months. That's crazy. I just got here, like, yesterday...

things that have happened in the past 10-ish days:

• One of the best things that happened to me this week was getting mistaken for a Swiss student. We had a substitute teacher and she didn't know I was an exchange student (e.g. I don't speak German) until I pulled out my phone to translate something... and I spoke with her in German several times before that!!
• I've found that in the past month or so, I feel like my German hasn't improved. In the first six weeks it was getting better every day, by leaps and bounds, and by the middle of the second month I was conversationally okay. But now I feel like I'm staying at the same level, or at least not getting better quite so quickly.
• That said, people are often surprised that I've only been speaking for 2 months, so hopefully I am continuing to learn. My host mom says that it's a fairly normal stage and that I am in fact better than I was before, so that's good. I think?
• took the PSAT last week Saturday. Guess who dropped her calculator on the way into the testing room and effectively broke the display?
• Other than that, the test was fine and I met Odile, an awesome girl who lives here (but speaks perfect English anyway because she's both American and Swiss.) So that was a highlight :)
• I've also been working on my Swiss German. My understanding of it gets better every day, but I don't have enough knowledge or vocabulary to completely switch over. This means that now I speak an odd mixture of Swiss German and High German, and it's a miracle that anyone can understand what I'm saying.
• Rotary!!! In the past couple weeks, I think we as exchange students have gotten a lot closer. It's funny because all of us are so different, but exchange seems to pull people together (whether they like it at the beginning or not). I'm really, really happy to have exchange friends who can understand what I'm going through (and put up with me when I'm being ridiculously stupid.)

that's all I'm going to write for now. bis später!

hannah

german for beginners

http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2012/09/default-language.html

So. Seeing as I'm now two months into my exchange (today! happy month-i-versary to me!), I figured I should know everything about this language and how to become completely fluent within a matter of weeks.
::can'tkeepastraightface::
Okay, maybe not. But anyway, I figured that I should post a little bit about what German is like for English speakers. Or maybe a lot bit, because my GOODNESS is German hard.

Anyway.

A Short Lesson on the German Language:
To start with, there are a lot of sounds we don't really have in English. This includes the Z, the W, the CH, and all the letters with umlauts: Ä Ö and Ü. They're complicated to pronounce, but don't worry, you'll get them. Hopefully.
The key is mostly to remember that it's not spoken like English. This may seem obvious, but it really isn't, and it's hard to remember. For example, a sentence in German:
"Hallo. Ich heisse Hannah, und ich kann ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen."
This roughly sounds like "normal greeting. (soundthatwedon'thaveinenglish) (verb, which you need to remember the correct ending to, no matter if they sound the same to you) (your name, which you should be able to pronounce), ("u" but not a hard u, a u more in the back of your throat) (soundthatwedon'thaveinenglishagain) (verb) (article that I think is wrong because my German grammar sucks) (anothersoundthatwedon'thaveinenglish...it's pronounced differently in Swiss German than in High German) (noun that must be capitalized in writing, because all nouns are capitalized) (another verb)."
Oh yes, the verb comes at the very end of a sentence if it's being used with another verb OR if it's part of a dependent clause. You'll have to learn that later in German grammar, and boy will that be tricky. (I'm still not absolutely sure any of this is right.) But meanwhile, you've learned the pronunciation of a few basic words. Good for you!

http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2012/09/comprehension.html

Next, some vocabulary. Note that there are articles before each word to tell you their "gender".
die Frau (the woman)
der Mann (the man)
das Mädchen (the girl)

"die" is feminine, "der" is masculine, and "das" is neutral. In this case, it happens to nicely match up with the gender of the meaning of the word... woman and man. But take a look at the third example and you'll realize it's not, actually, that simple. Why are girls without a gender? I have no idea.
[More random examples of der, die, and das: das Kleid (the dress), der Apfel (the apple), die Katze (the cat), die Rübe (the turnip), die Krankheit (the sickness), das Buch (the book), and das Wort (the word).]
If you haven't figured it out already, the point is that the gender of the word is really not connected to the gender or the meaning. Or the spelling. Or the type of thing it means. In fact, the gender of the word doesn't actually have much rhyme or reason behind it. It just... is there. Plus, you have to learn the plurals with the original noun, and there are about 7 different variations for what a plural can look like. This means that you must frantically attempt to memorize everything.

http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2013/06/overthinking-it.html

To make things more complicated (this is German. Why would anything want to be simple?), there are four different forms of these articles: Dativ, Genitiv, Nominativ, and Akkusativ. This depends on whether the object being spoken of is doing something, being something, having something done to it, etc. For example, in German accusative form, der turns to den and the others stay the same--but in German dative form, the masculine der and neutral das turn to dem and the feminine die turns to der--which isn't to be confused with the "der" in nominative, which means masculine, not feminine.
Oh, and all the adjectives continue to change with these articles. So if a cat (die Katze) was blue, it'd be "eine blaue Katze" but if a book (das Buch) was blue, it'd be "ein blaues Buch" and if an apple (der Apfel) was blue, it'd be "ein blauer Apfel". At least, I think that's right.

Confused yet? And we haven't even addressed the verbs and question forms!

No wonder Germans are supposed to sound angry. I'd be too, if I had to learn all that. ;)

(side note: I don't actually find German that bad, although I suppose that the way I've described it does sound rather impossible, doesn't it? And I haven't even described half of it... That said, German is a really lovely language to learn. I promise. And hopefully I will be fluent at the end of this year.)

tschuess,
hannah

p.s. guess what? Swiss German is even harder!!!! :)

days < 60 -- accepting

piece of advice for future exchange students #12:

try, as soon as possible, to adjust to the life here and accept it as different.

just because it's different doesn't mean that it is bad,

just because it's different doesn't mean that it is good,

the only thing that it means is that it is...

different.

This past week has been pretty up and down for me. I've discovered a lot of things (places, people, and stories) and some of them have honestly been great.

Others... not so much. It's hard to deal with the fact that life here is not what I've been used to, and while the transition so far has been fairly easy, I'm beginning to miss things from home.

Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is still amazing. And I love it here, and I'm not coming back before the end of my exchange year. It's just that this past month has been a bit of a rollercoaster, what with loving Portland and Switzerland simultaneously and trying to figure out how that works. So... yes...

anyway.

things I've done in the past 10 or so days:

• more traveling! Hooray for the GA!*
• I've now been to all of ten cantons: Basel-Stadt, Basel-Land, Aargau, Solothurn, Zurich, Bern, Luzern, Appenzell IR, Appenzell AR, and Sankt Gallen. 16 to go :)
• Today I am packing for our trip to Vienna tomorrow. Normally packing is a struggle for me, but seeing as I don't have very much clothing here, it's very fast and extremely easy. "Hmmm, so I need to bring two sweaters. Oh look, I only HAVE two sweaters..."
• Oh yes. Did I mention that we're going to VIENNA tomorrow?
• VIENNA!!!!!!!!!!!
• AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• I'm, you know, just a little bit excited. ;)
• I have discovered that the buses only run every hour on Saturday to my village after 6:56. Which means that if the train comes at 6:57, I am not getting home until 8:30.
• I have also discovered that cheese and bread are the cheapest things you can buy in Switzerland. Since I love Swiss cheese and Swiss bread almost as much as I love chocolate, this makes me very happy.
• Especially considering my next discovery: a hamburger at McDonalds can easily set you back 13 to 15 francs. And that's one of the cheapest places you can eat, according to one of my Swiss friends.
• My friend Anni invited me to Solothurn with her host family. I wasn't exactly sure what we were doing (she said "bring hiking boots and a jacket") but I was happy to be doing something so I went. It was awesome... a midair challenge course through the forest climbing up to scary heights and swinging through branches at scary heights and sliding down from scary heights. Something a bit like Tree to Tree in Eugene, OR, except more exciting and probably more dangerous. Oh well.
• As of last night, my family is speaking Swiss German to me. (I asked them to do it... I really, really, really want to learn Swiss German.) I understand a good bit, but I'm horrible at speaking. Hopefully this will change.

tschuess for now,

Hannah

*If you aren't a Swiss Rotary Exchange student and you don't know what the GA is... it's basically a train, tram, bus, and boat pass that allows you to use all of the public transportation in Switzerland--for free. 

It is more precious than gold.

days > 50 -- exploring

advice for future exchange students #11:

enjoy the fact that you're in another country. 

and go discover new things!

the rest of the world is not that hard to access.

the GA (General Abonnement, which means that you basically get all transportation free) is the best thing anyone could ever ask for. It is more precious than gold. :P

Lately I've gotten the chance to just explore, on my own or with friends, and I am loving it. Switzerland is very safe, very scenic, and very easy to explore by train and bus... which means that basically it's heaven for exchange students. I love that I can just get up and be on the other side of the country in 3 hours.

things that have happened in the past 10 (ish) days:

• Appenzell: a place where all the houses look like gingerbread houses because they are ridiculously adorable. Also where people make cheese. I counted 5 times as many cows as people on the tram ride there.
• St. Gallen: a place where the buildings are really tall and the churches are beautiful. I discovered the most lovely church in St Gallen... actually, scratch that, all the churches are lovely here. But especially in St. Gallen.
• Zurich: a place where everyone is rich.
• Also, we went to the Basel flea market! the flea markets in Portland are really small and not that great, but the Basel flea market was fun to explore :) I bought a pair of leather shoes that look new for 10 francs, and normally the same shoes run 200 francs or more... 
• I went to the cinema (again) and watched a movie in German with my host mom and one of her friends. It was fun, and this time I actually understood most of what was happening. It's funny, to think of how much better my language skills are now than they were before.
• School's out, schöni ferie zäme :)

days > 40 -- attempting

advice for future exchange students #10:
when your school friends speak a dialect, try to learn it. just try.
you've got nothing to lose besides your pride
and really, if you're on exchange chances are you'll become immune to embarassment sometime.

so with school and everything I basically forgot that I have a blog.
whoops.

Something that I've learned here: just try things. Try them. Especially since I'm an exchange student and I'm no good at most things, I can step outside my comfort zone and attempt lots of things because I already look stupid am foreign, and thus it doesn't matter. I've attempted volleyball, tabletennis, and handsprings, with somewhat varying levels of failure... I've talked to a dozen people a day in very bad Swiss German... I've tried various different foods and multiple juice/mineralwater/soda-ish drinks... and so far I haven't died.
It's a good lesson for me. Sometimes pride doesn't get you anywhere. And sometimes nothing is better than attempting a new thing, even if you look like a complete idiot. ;)

things that have happened in the past 10ish days:

• I successfully asked for directions in German, received them in German, and was able to follow them. It basically made my entire week.
• went to Zurich! It was nice. and expensive. and pretty. and expensive. and we walked a lot. plus, did I mention that it's expensive?
• School is good. The second day of my arrival, I had a Physics test in German. So... that was interesting...
• I also took a math test in German last week. I've never been so excited about a A-/B+ (the grades are a bit different here, but I think that's the American equivalent) in my entire life. 
• Rotary weekends in Switzerland = awesome. I think all the most amazing people in other countries somehow picked Switzerland as their destination? Which means that I get to meet all of them :) hooray!
• I seem to have come back with a slight Aussie (edit: after a little bit of thought, I've concluded it's actually New Zealander) accent that I can't get rid of. This makes things interesting.
• The Swiss Rotex find it really funny when I speak Swiss German. So do my schoolmates. I'm not exactly sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
• I have conquered the chocolate chip cookie. After finding that Switzerland does not in fact have vanilla extract, brown sugar, or chocolate chips, I substituted multiple things, did conversions, weighed everything in my host family's kitchen, and finally ended up with fairly good cookies.
• popped over to Germany to buy an ice cream. That wasn't really necessary, I just enjoy saying that I popped over to Germany. It makes me feel like a world traveler :)

bis nachste mal,

hannah

girl meets world: my first week of school in another country

So, today marks Friday and my first official week of school ever. Plenty of people have asked me what school looks like in Switzerland, so here's a quick rundown of the differences I've noticed:

• There are two different types of high school: FMS and Gymi, or Gymnasium. Gymnasium is for students to pursue "higher" branches of learning, and FMS is for things like teaching and art and dentistry etc. You can easily get a job coming from either high school. (I got put in FMS... explanation to come later.)
• You have only one class of students, and you see them every day. Mine is about 17 people, which is the average for FMS--Gymnasium classes have an average of 25 people (but they can't be any more than that, it's illegal.) This is actually really nice, because I have the same kids in my class every day and it's easier to make friends.
• Every day is not the same... your days are broken up into 50 minute sessions and each day is different. So on Tuesday I have Physik, Musik, Geschichte (history), Englisch, and Deutsch, but on Wednesday I have Klassenstunde (a weird thing that varies from week to week), Musik, Biologie, and Mathematik.
• This also means that you can take way more subjects than in American high school, simply because you have so many timeslots to fill. As of my last counting, I have 14 different classes. I'm not sure if that's a lot? It seems like an awful lot to me...

Anyway. Now that you know all about Swiss high school, here's an average morning before school for me:

6:00am--wake up. I refuse to wake up earlier than 6 (well actually I normally end up waking up at 5:50 because I have a weird tendency to anticipate my alarm... but I refuse to get out of bed earlier than 6, so). I get dressed, pack my school bag, review my bus schedule so I don't miss the bus again, and do all the normal things that one does in the morning.
6:30am--eat breakfast. It's still dark outside, and cold. Brrrr, Switzerland.
6:50am--leave the house. I have to catch the bus at 6:56 to the Rheinfelden main station, and then take the train from Rheinfelden to Muttenz, and then walk for about 10 minutes from the Muttenz station to my school. Hopefully I don't get lost, because my school is in the middle of an industrial area and there aren't that many people around at 7:30am to ask for directions.
7:50am-- If I'm lucky, I find one of my classmates and we walk to class together. If I'm not, I rush madly up and down stairs in an attempt to find the room. After I've finally located it (I swear the FMS building has no logical order to their room numbers whatsoever) I go into the classroom and we all wait for the teacher, who shows up promptly at 7:55. These are Swiss people, after all.

Voila. And school hasn't even started yet!

But after I find my classroom and my classmates, things get easier. Since we all have the same classes, I can just follow everyone else around and theoretically get where I need to be at the time I need to be. So far it's worked pretty well. :)

The majority of my classmates are really friendly and super nice about showing me where classes are and translating for me when I have no idea what's going on. Also, people keep commenting on how good my German is already, which is not exactly right... but it makes me happy, haha.

I'm currently in Physik, Mathematik, Biologie, Franzoesisch, Deutsch, Sport, Art (which I can't remember the name of in German), Wirtschaft und Rechts (economics), Computer Science (which I also can't remember the name of), Musik, Geschichte, and Englisch. Also my other Deutschkurs, something called PP that I don't understand, and something called Klassenstunde that confuses me.
Because I'm feeling nice, I won't drag you through my entire schedule for the week. You're welcome.

Highlights:

• Music! We started with music theory (thank you, Animate Studio and voice lessons and voice teacher who gave me two years of intensive theory) and sang in the second hour. Also, the songs were all really old hits in English. Think Moonlight Shadow and House of the Rising Sun. Since I like singing and I could actually read the lyrics, it was a good class for me.
• The economics teacher told us we didn't have any homework because I was in class and I might not understand it. This made me a lot more popular with the other students ;)
• For my very first day we had three hours of Art. Hooray for art, it doesn't require you to speak very much and you have plenty of time to draw and think and attempt to translate what the teacher is saying. Probably the best Monday class to have, ever.
• French is an optional class, because all the teaching is either in French or German and I've had neither of those languages in school. Because I've wanted to learn French, I stayed in the first class just to see what would happen. That said, I was surprised to discover that I actually understood part of what was going on! Language has always been something fairly intuitive for me-- some people get math, some people get science, I get languages. But I wasn't expecting to be able to read and understand very much, as I've never in my life taken French. I think maybe Spanish helped, or possibly my brain was in learn-a-new-language mode... either way, it was a nice surprise :)

In the majority of my classes, I don't have homework (hooray!) This is mostly because my teachers are really nice and understand that I have no idea what to do with written German homework. I do understand what's going on in the class, and I can follow along to some extent. From what I've heard about school on exchange, school is really boring, but so far I haven't found that to be true.

and so concludes a very long probably boring post.
We'll see what happens next week... stay tuned!

in which hannah learns a bit of french, meets a tiger (and a canadian), and eats too much chocolate

So this post is pretty overdue, seeing as I did all of this about two weeks ago.. but hey, it's still an update, right? I'll try to put a ton of posts after this and maybe it'll look like I posted it semi-on-time.

 Anyway.
On Saturday, my host family told me that they wanted to take me to see the tiger in the next village over. I was a little surprised considering this is Switzerland and not India, and I wasn't expecting to see a tiger my first month of exchange. But, it sounded interesting and I've never seen a village tiger before, so I said yes.
We drove for about 10 or 15 minutes and then walked for a while. (I'm beginning to realize that most outings begin with a walk, whether you're in Luzern or in Magden or in Rheinfelden or in Basel.)
After turning down a dirt road we arrived at a small farm. It did not exactly appear to be the type of place that exotic animals reside in... but sure enough after [more] walking and a good look around, we located the tigers. Shortly after that, I and my host family and our fellow village people filed into a very large dingy barn and the show began.

 We sat really close to the cage... almost too close for comfort, considering that it was a very old-looking cage... but the animals that filed in did not look wild and ferocious. They reminded me of very old overweight cats, which was unexpectedly funny.
Apparently the tigers are the hardest to train because they are sneaky and not very obedient. In the trainer's words, sie sind listig, which means something like clever/sly in English...
The lions are also hard to train because they are very lazy. (And fat. The lions are really fat. They don't really look like Simba at all, they look more like the weiner dog who used to live next door to me. And they walk like he did too.) They are more interested in the food than in the trick-performing part.

Leopards are the most teachable wild felines. They are small, and quick, and smart, and for the most part clever at learning tricks. They were also the only animals with sufficient grace to live up to my ideal of the jungle creatures :)
Okay, nature lesson over. After the animals were done performing, the man came out and answered a lot of questions that I didn't really understand because they were in Swiss German.
In fact, a lot of time here is spent listening to questions I can't really understand because they're in Swiss German. I think this is a recurring theme in my life.

And that was it for the lions and tigers and leopards... oh my!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

After this, I met up with Faith (who you already know) and Ryan (who's a Canadian exchange student) in Basel. Ryan is from Fribourg and he speaks fluent French. It makes me jealous just to write about it... but he taught Faith and me some very basic things in Franzoesisch, which makes me happy. I can now say "I love you", "my name is Hannah", and "I come from the United States." Unfortunately I think I have an unbelievably horrible French accent... :/ but oh well.

We bought chocolate bars and ate probably too much chocolate* and laughed and discussed exchange and four-leaf-clovers and Swiss German and trams and a lot of things that I can't really remember anymore but it really doesn't matter because we were in Basel. on a summer day. in the park.

it was a good day.

*I don't think I've ever eaten so much chocolate in one month. you have no idea.

days > 30 -- learning

advice for future exchange students #9:

be fluent in the language already.

okay, well, maybe that won't work. 

but do work on the language as much as possible.

trust me, it's a good idea.

things that have happened in the past 10 days:

• I ended Deutsch Kurs. We had a very long test at the end of the four weeks, but thankfully it wasn't that hard and I passed as the second best of my class, which was a nice surprise.
• I started school. Yaaayyyyyyyyyyyy! (oh yeah. there'll be a post about that later. hopefully. i think. we'll see. maybe if I have time.)
• I went to my little sister's school. Her classmates were adorable and helpful and very willing to talk to me. I probably learned more that day than I did in a week of German course. Note to self: children are amazing for learning a language.
• I went to Pilatus, which is a really tall mountain in Luzern. It's absolutely gorgeous. I also roamed the streets of Luzern with my host family, which was pretty cool.
• Swimming in the Rhine. end of story.
• I heard my first yodeling! This was interesting.
• My hosting Rotary club met with a Rotary club from Germany on the weekend, so I came too. It involved food, boats, walking, and a lot of people commenting on how good my German is. This naturally made me very happy. Unfortunately, many of them concluded that I was fluent and proceeded to speak German to me all the time. I felt really guilty every time I couldn't understand what they were saying...
• I realized that my English is getting worse. Occasionally I'll find myself speaking English in German grammar, or spelling things wrong, or not remembering a perfectly average word. This confuses me.
• I realized that I have lost a good bit of my Spanish and Chinese. This also confuses me.

this was a rather random and rambling post. sorry. ich hoffe dass die nachste Mal wird besser sein.

tschuess, ciao, adieu, adios, zai jian, goodbye, and whatever else floats your boat,

hannah