Ball State

» apotheke

By China at 4:12 PM

You know how every once in a while you have to do an assignment in school that just totally doesn't interest you and you just put it off until the last minute. I know that I am certainly not the only one who does this but I am quite experienced with the whole of the process. Right now because of summer and my desire to finish my degree as fast as possible, I have been taking classes all summer long. To make sure that everything works out for me I have decided that this session I am only taking one class. The class is the basics of German. I am not taking this out of interest, because I am not very good at learning languages, but I am taking it as both a resume booster and some quick refreshment in case I ever have to, god forbid, work with Germans or in Germany. Anyway, aside from my motivations to be a successful business person, there is really nothing in this class for me. So the only way I have been surviving is by making my time outside of class as valuable as possible. Right now though I have found that this class has a ton of assignments. Though they are quite small, they are just painfully boring and sometimes make me feel like the teacher is patronizing the students.

Take the current assignment for example. I have to translate this piece of German writing that is as follow:

Wer krank ist geht in die Apotheke. Dort können wir Medikamente und Medizin kaufen, um schnell wieder zu genesen. Das funktioniert natürlich mit einer Online-Apotheke genau so. Der Vorteil der Versandapotheke besteht darin, dass wir die Medikamente nach Hause geliefert bekommen. Entscheidender und nicht zu verachtender Vorteil, die Onlineapotheke ist oftmals noch um einige Prozente günstiger - und man muss nicht ausser Haus. Für einen kranken Menschen kann dies ein enormer Vorteil sein.

Now I totally understand that the teacher has to make it easy for us to learn things, but this just doesn't make sense. I can just take this little bit of writing and plug it in to a translator and never learn a thing about the language. I think that a language is best earned through immersion in the culture and the people who speak it. Not through mindless translation and baby talk.