Just letting you know you may have left out a question--something about Christmas food? Let me know if you decide to edit and I can add the "holidays" tag.
RE: Mod Notenightrose83December 4 2015, 13:36:40 UTC
Ah, I probably did. I think the question centered around if the food was being spelled properly, but a check on Google confirmed it. Thanks, though. :)
To 1.) Nowadays studies are more structured but back then students often took their exchange time (usually 1-2 terms = 6-12 months) after the halfway point of their studies. This halfway point (after you had kind of a midterm exam for the first part of your studies) varys from subject to subject but is mostly doable after at least 4 terms = two years. Usually you start school with 6 years, sometimes also with you 7th birthday - depends on when you were born. Let's assume you started with 6. Then you need to have had 13 years of education before entering university. So you start with 19. Plus at least 2 years of university studies before your halfway point = 21years when you have your exchange year. But that's the best case scenario - with him starting school at 6 and then going through school without repeating a year; and then going through his studies at university without failing an important test. I would add 2-3 years and say your character is between 23-25. But 21 is possible of course.
Thank you very much, very appreciated. I did have one question in regards to MC's mother's age when she would have done everything, though. Say she did her exchange period when she was 23 (or close to it) and left university around age 26 (if that's possible). She wants to be a teacher, so the way I understood it is, after university she would have been in training for about two years before she could be considered a full-fledged teacher. Going with the ages there, those calculations would make her around 28 when that happened. I wanted to be sure that sounded somewhat plausible, or she would be older when those things happened?
Unfortunately I have no idea about how many years someone needs to study to be a teacher but I tried google it and it's about 4,5-5 years for "Gymnasium", so 28 years sounds plausible. I think the earliest can be with 25 when you finished school without any obstacles when you're 18. But who's that good?! So 28 would be absolutely possible..
Okay, as long as it's possible for her to be a teacher by 28, I think I have most of my things figured out. It may not come into play in the story anywhere, but it's useful for me to have for my own information, anyway. Her child would be born when she's about 29-30ish (and she wasn't planning on marrying/moving but it just kind of happened), so I don't want to mess up her age in my head when it's time to write it.
How much German is being spoken around him at home? I discovered a few years ago that while my core Italian vocab is basic for similar reasons, I know some surprisingly useful phrases simply from listening to my family over the years [dear bilingual parents: if you switch to your other language to swear or discuss 'not in front of the children' subjects, your kids do pick up those phrases even if they don't quite know what they all mean!]. I can sound more fluent than I am, particularly since I can read written Italian aloud without hesitation or pronunciation issues. Your character could pass for more fluent if he wanted to - or be mistaken for more fluent, if you gave his mother a distinctive accent she'd passed on to him. If you don't want him to be, then having a cloth ear for languages is hardly uncommon. :)
He likely would have been taught basic numbers, colors and sentences as a very young child. Possibly some less-than-polite things too, but even those would have been fairly mild. Other than that, he would have seen it as something more annoying than useful whenever his mother tried, and will likely be kicking himself at some point down the line for not paying attention more. Kids are interesting--my father's grandparents spoke German and he recalls his grandmother would teach him prayers and simple things. She and his grandfather would speak back and forth in it among each other, and one evening they were discussing inviting him to stay for dinner. My father said that yes, he would, although they hadn't directly asked him yet. :) He's forgotten it now, and I do wish I had a more immediate family member in this sort of situation because things like this are fascinating to me.
likely be kicking himself at some point down the line Yes, we three kids have all expressed our regret at not learning Italian more formally; for "family politics" reasons my dad actually refused to teach us more than the basics and we never pushed it (or had the opportunity to learn at school), so to some extent we couldn't really change that much, but improving our basic knowledge as adults has definitely been harder than learning as children would have been. I'm in the odd position of being way more adept in German than I am in French or Italian, which are our main family languages. But the very core vocab is unshakeable - I'll probably never forget how to count in Italian (if I do I will also have forgotten how to count in English too, I guess).
The rejection of parental tuition is not uncommon IME. But that "learning by osmosis" means some things will always stick.
Unfortunately, my family hasn't had any language other than English for a few generations. I took Spanish out of necessity, but by then, any wiring I would have had was 'hardening' so to speak. I can say some simple things, but my Spanish-speaking coworker thinks my language skills in his native tongue are horrible.
Agreeing with what dunderklumpen already said, 21 for the exchange is possible, but only if everything went very smoothly. Before recent restructuring, it wasn't unusual or even considered a big deal for students to graduate between 26~28ish. For the mid-studies gap, I'd find 23~24 more normal myself, too. Some people also go at 19 right after high school. (Which can be another contributing factor that makes people older in uni
( ... )
I would like to partly disagree - based on personal experience. I studied English at university and spent one term in England in 1996. As already mentioned by others, I went after I had passed my "mid-studies exam". I was 22 and turned 23 during that time.
Back then, at least in Northrhine-Westphalia, it was not required to spend any time in an English-speaking country at all if you studied English. And next to no one did so. Only very few of us (we were several hundred) applied for an exchange program - either Erasmus or DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst). In my year, none of us passed the test to get accepted by the DAAD, but since we were so few applicants in the first place, most of us managed to get accepted by Erasmus.
I went via Erasmus. My university was in contact with two or three British universities, and I was able to say which university I would prefer to attend.
In my experience it depends on your home university in how far credits are recognised. My university recognised almost none.
Okay, thank you. The MC's mother would have been going through her education and exchange in the 70s/80s, but the story itself takes place some years later. I did ask further upthread about what age she would be for certain milestones, such as leaving university and then going on to become a teacher. She might be a better student than average, but not so good that the times she graduates would be very far ahead of her peers. So, I thought her being around 23 for her exchange, 26 for leaving university, and 28 after she's done her teacher's training would be around the correct timeframe, although I might be missing something?
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Nowadays studies are more structured but back then students often took their exchange time (usually 1-2 terms = 6-12 months) after the halfway point of their studies. This halfway point (after you had kind of a midterm exam for the first part of your studies) varys from subject to subject but is mostly doable after at least 4 terms = two years. Usually you start school with 6 years, sometimes also with you 7th birthday - depends on when you were born. Let's assume you started with 6. Then you need to have had 13 years of education before entering university. So you start with 19. Plus at least 2 years of university studies before your halfway point = 21years when you have your exchange year. But that's the best case scenario - with him starting school at 6 and then going through school without repeating a year; and then going through his studies at university without failing an important test. I would add 2-3 years and say your character is between 23-25. But 21 is possible of course.
To 2: Sounds logical to me.
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Yes, we three kids have all expressed our regret at not learning Italian more formally; for "family politics" reasons my dad actually refused to teach us more than the basics and we never pushed it (or had the opportunity to learn at school), so to some extent we couldn't really change that much, but improving our basic knowledge as adults has definitely been harder than learning as children would have been. I'm in the odd position of being way more adept in German than I am in French or Italian, which are our main family languages. But the very core vocab is unshakeable - I'll probably never forget how to count in Italian (if I do I will also have forgotten how to count in English too, I guess).
The rejection of parental tuition is not uncommon IME. But that "learning by osmosis" means some things will always stick.
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Back then, at least in Northrhine-Westphalia, it was not required to spend any time in an English-speaking country at all if you studied English. And next to no one did so. Only very few of us (we were several hundred) applied for an exchange program - either Erasmus or DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst). In my year, none of us passed the test to get accepted by the DAAD, but since we were so few applicants in the first place, most of us managed to get accepted by Erasmus.
I went via Erasmus. My university was in contact with two or three British universities, and I was able to say which university I would prefer to attend.
In my experience it depends on your home university in how far credits are recognised. My university recognised almost none.
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