💬 Teacher Comment
✅ We're still at a point where you're translating many sentences directly from German and, in many cases, it just about works. For example, when we were talking about the disappearance of snow in the Ge...
🎯 Improve: Be careful with articles. At one point you said, 'I just decided on a very short notice' which should rather be, 'I just decided on short notice'. In this instance the article is not necessary. Howeve...
✅ Give it a few weeks and you'll be sounding like you're from Pennsylvania (the US state with the largest population of people of German heritage).
🎯 Improve: I noticed a handful of occasions where you made a 'soft' r sound (as in rural) a bit more forceful than it should be. I know words like rural and squirrel are difficult because they have two soft 'r's...
✅ You sometimes stop and second-guess yourself, which is useful when it turns into a correction, but unhelpful when it remains unresolved.
🎯 Improve: If you have doubts about a particular phrase or word, make sure you make your correction based on use context or grammaticality rather than 'intuition' which can potentially come from your mental map ...
✅ As mentioned, you're still translating some small phrases directly from German but, thanks to shared roots, the small grammatical errors of direct translation often don't change meaning.
🎯 Improve: For example, in the case of 'many languages I didn't know' we would rather say, 'many languages I hadn't heard of' because the former talks about your ability to speak the languages in question, and t...
✅ We cleared up the difference between germs (a generic term for bacteria, viruses, fungus etc.) vs. bacteria (single cell organisms that can be both good and bad depending on their place and function),...
🎯 Improve: We jumped from topic to topic quite quickly and, at some points, I noticed you might have been a bit confused by words I used. However, I also noticed that you wanted to keep the conversation flowing....