GERM 1101 - Beginning German Language and Culture I

1. Effectively converse in German in the present tense on topics such as school, home, shopping, clothing and daily routines and comprehend spoken German and brief readings on those topics.
2. Employ idiomatic expressions and communicative strategies such as circumlocution, in written and spoken German, to convey a message rather than relying on word-for-word translation.
3. Break down and analyze a sentence and label words by their grammatical function and syntactic structures.
4. Conjugate verbs and employ the principles of gender and number agreement to formulate complete sentences and compose brief essays in the present tense.
5. Recognize morphological cues such as prefixes and suffixes as well as borrowed words and cognates derived from common languages (such as Latin) to guess the meanings of unfamiliar words in English and German.
6. Apply orthographic conventions and accent rules to correctly spell words, based on how they sound, and to pronounce words correctly based on their spelling.
7. Empathize with the difficulties any non-native English speakers, minorities, and immigrants face in learning a second language.
8. Identify some of the basic cultural distinctions and linguistic variations between the German-speaking countries and regions within these countries environment as reflected both in grammar and vocabulary.
9. Reflect on the political, social, economic, cultural and linguistic influence and contributions from Germany and Germans, who immigrated to the American continent. Consider also family names, place names, daily customs, architecture, and music.
10. Identify examples of German vocabulary borrowed from other linguistic groups through historical events.
11. Label the German speaking countries and regions on a map and be able to discuss the economic role German-speaking countries play within the European Union, and in relation to the United States.
12. Consider the role religion and the Church have played in the history of Germany and the German-speaking world, and the role it plays in present society.
13. Reflect on the issue of immigration and understand some of the historical and political dynamics within Germany that caused it. Compare and contrast immigration groups and patterns in the United States and in German-speaking countries.
14. Understand something about the current social values and norms in Germany, and how they are being shaped in reaction to the extensive American cultural presence in Germany.

1. Greetings and expressions of courtesy
2. Alphabet, pronunciation, word stress, accent rules and orthographic rules
3. Cognates and borrowed words
4. Numbers through 100,000,000
5. Telling time
6. Expressing likes and dislikes
7. Definite and indefinite articles
8. Gender and number agreement between nouns and adjectives
9. Expressing possession
10. Expressing future tense (werden + infinitive)
11. Present tense conjugation of regular, irregular and some stem-changing verbs
12. Expressions with “haben”
13. Vocabulary relating to school, home, family, clothing and shopping
14. Basic geography of the German-speaking world
15. Cultural vignettes through readings, class discussions, videos and multimedia presentations