by Leah Joann Pappas
I’m not a huge fan of cities, especially big cities. I never have been. But Berlin is beginning to change my stereotypical view of them. I really love so much about it. It’s clean, there aren’t too many cars, the people are so friendly, and there is so much green space! I learned from a friend that Berlin is nearly the size of New York, but compared to New York’s population of 8 million, Berlin has 3.5 million, so the city just feels so spread out and even relaxed! I can’t bring myself to feel stressed here. Every day, there’s a new park or lake to visit. I love going for runs, just picking a direction at random and seeing what I find. There’s always new things to see! And now I can officially leave my apartment without a map, and be able to find my way to the most important places in the city without getting too lost…success!
As for the lab this week, running the study is in full swing. The days are long, but at the end I’m satisfied with the data I’ve collected. At the end of this week, I’ll have run 9 participants! Almost 1/3 of the way there! It’s really been testing my French abilities. So far, all of my participants have been very kind and enthusiastic, but many of them seem to have flawless French, and constantly correct my mistakes. It makes me feel very self-conscious of my little-practiced French over the past year, but their understanding is really nice. The bilingual scene here is just so extremely different from in the United States. Not only is there less frustration when people are speaking in their L2, all of my participants so far have spoken multiple languages. After running the experiments, we have had conversations in French, English, German (very broken on my part), and even Spanish! What an experience each and every participant is!
I also had my first lab meeting on Monday, and boy was that an adventure! The presentation was very interesting (from what I gathered it was an ERP study based on semantic processing concerning the word jemals, “ever”) The one obstacle: the entire lab meeting was in German! What fun that was! I had told Katharina that it was absolutely okay for the lab meetings to be in German, I would understand as much as I could. So armed with a notebook and my pocket translator, I pieced together the sentences, and gathered the main ideas of most things… I believe. I can’t wait to see how my understanding progresses over the weeks!