A1

Today, I finally finished Duolingo’s German A1 sections. I’m so happy. =) But there are fucking 51 units under the A2 section. I hope to finish it before August 15th. During the last ~15 days, I’ve been studying at least a unit per day, sometimes even two or three. Let’s wait and see how it will go.

By the way, sometimes I watch Rentnercops series. It’s a German series about two retired cops. (rentner=retired) When I started, I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on in each episode. It remained like that until some weeks ago. But after ~2 weeks of massive studying, everything changed. Not that I can fully understand all of their words now. But, at least I can understand the structure of their sentences and keep up with the story better than before. However, there is still a huge room for improvement; So I still need to trust in the process and don’t get disappointed. I feel I got a little disappointed right after I encountered this “51” number. It has almost the same feeling as when you are at the starting point of a hiking track.

Egal. Another thing I wanted to talk about is related to wearing the confidence mask. Yesterday, there was a presentation by one of the labs at MPI. They wanted to present their previous and ongoing projects. After their presentation, I knew no one had a single clue about all of their works. So, almost no one was going to ask any questions. At this point, I raised my hand and asked “I don’t see any added value in your project X. Can you describe it more?” Followed by that, I also asked some challenging questions about the usage of their tool. Their answers didn’t really matter to me that much. I could see that a lot of students -and even to some degree myself- were kind of shocked that I asked my questions so frankly.

Here’s the thing that actually matters: Again, I wasn’t a nice person and nothing went wrong. I even impressed some people. One might even say, I’m the only student that stood out there. (There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?) So, another day, another positive feedback from the environment for my character’s evolution. Let’s see how far I can go with it!