The German Express

Our German Express consists of a series of intensive courses taking a student from no knowledge of German to fluency in less than one year and having her or him enroll at a German university during spring quarter. This program was introduced in 1991 and has been quite successful. Most participants are not German majors, but rather highly motivated students who want to gain mastery of German as quickly as possible.

We invite the best students from our 100-intensive German (summer quarter) and the best students from the German 103 classes (winter, spring, summer quarters) to participate in an accelerated 200-level course. About 60-70 percent of the students accept the invitation and during autumn quarter take part in German 221, which combines two quarters of second-year German into one. This course is team taught by a faculty member and a selected TA. At the end of autumn quarter, the Department awards stipends of $1000 each to the best five students in German 221, to be applied towards study during spring quarter at Tübingen and Freiburg Universities.

The selected students go through another module of accelerated instruction during winter quarter, simultaneously taking German 230 and 301, to prepare them as best we can for their study abroad experience. When in Germany, students are asked to fend for themselves, there is no safety net for them to fall back on. At first, students compare their situation to being thrown into cold water, but once they adjust, their main complaint is that the program is not long enough. There is one concession that we allow and actually encourage for our German Express students when they register for courses in Germany: we recommend that they take classes intended for foreigners, and this way our students will not be competing with native Germans, which would put them at an unfair disadvantage. We have not encountered one student who did not come back extremely enthusiastic about the study abroad experience.

The proposed Sequence of Courses is as follows: