Remember how I decided to take intensive first-year German? Yeahhhh … that actually happened. It’s been two and a half months since the beginning of school. Here’s an update on my progress.

I used to be the type of student who planned my schedules so that I’d always have Fridays off. One semester, I arranged a four-day weekend (to which I can attest is only a good idea in theory). German class meets every single day. At 9am. And I commute from Boston. Do the math. The fact that I have only missed one class so far, because of my trip to Chicago, is a testament to 1) my newfound ability to manage my academics and 2) the awesomeness of the course.

“Intensive” language courses at Harvard teach a year’s worth of material in one semester, which sounds insane, but is surprisingly doable if you are conscientious about completing daily assignments and keeping up with vocabulary. (You also get credit for two classes instead of one, so score!) Some of the people in my very small section have a bit more German exposure than others, some are taking the class for academic reasons (so that they can eventually read philosophical texts), some are doing it for fun, and at least one other person, like me, is learning the language because of a significant other. I was surprised by how fun the class is and how much better the learning experience is when you actually know random things about your classmates thanks to ridiculous roleplaying exercises.

I now boast a formidable, though not very sophisticated, vocabulary, though I can’t always string those words together to form grammatically correct sentences. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m comfortable with sounding out random German words (not previously possible given my horrid pronunciation), constructing sentences with more than one clause, and using occasional colloquialisms (still a work in progress). A couple weeks ago, I switched my iPhone settings to German. Today, I changed my Gmail and my Facebook. It’s all an attempt to make the language a little less foreign. Perhaps I’ll attempt to read a couple children’s books in German. Still a far cry from Kant, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.