The owner accepted out offer on the house to rent, so this afternoon we filled in all the formal application material and put down a deposit. [One tip: if you go with a 12 month lease instead of just 6 they'll often knock a little off the list price--we're saving £25/month.] As long as they find us kosher financially, we’re good to go on 21 April (the day of the eviction). We’ve packed enough of the house that we’ve decided to go to Ireland whether or not the eviction gets delayed at our court hearing on Tuesday. If it does, then we’ll just have more time to clean the new place before we settle in. Thanks for all the prayers and well wishes. They’ve meant a lot to all of us.
Saturday, 11 April 2009
House Update: Tentative Approval
Posted by Ben C. Blackwell under Family, International Life[5] Comments
Sunday, 12 April 2009 at 5:29 am
Hi Ben.
I wish you & the fam all the best with all the housing stuff.
Anyway, I’m planning to do a Th.M in New Testament in the US (either at Talbot School of Theol. or Trinity) before applying for a doctoral program for NT in the U.K., and I wanted to ask… how did you go about acquiring German? Did you just learn with books alone or did you enroll in some local comm. college? It seems to me that the focus for a doctoral program is not so much speaking as it is reading and translating, and I don’t know that that is the primary focus for language classes offered at local schools/colleges here (I live in So. Cal., and I think the clases I found around here focus more on the speaking aspect)…
I didn’t want to waste my money taking classes if that’s not how others went about acquiring German…
Thanks!
Sunday, 12 April 2009 at 8:03 am
I used a variety of methods: self-study with a grammar and computer program, a reading-focused class here at Durham, a ju-co level intro class (2nd semester), and an intensive course in Berlin for a month. With that mix of study, I feel fairly confident with the language, though vocab could always be better. Most people I know here will only doing the reading class, which I would say is the highest priority.
I suppose it depends on how well you want to know it. I would expect that Talbot or Trinity would have a german class (At DTS they only advertised it with PhD students, but others could take it.) However, the speaking focused classes force you to understand the language at a different level, and I’d say I found that quite helpful. The downside it that most of the vocab you learn for speaking classes isn’t relevant for theological german.
I would encourage some study before you do the phd in the uk since the longer you spend with it the more comfortable you’ll be in actually using it.
Sunday, 12 April 2009 at 8:15 am
Mike,
I just updated my PhD pointers page to include the main posts I’ve done on learning German (and French), if you want to look there: http://dunelm.wordpress.com/phd-pointers/
Monday, 13 April 2009 at 7:20 pm
hey Ben.
thanks for all that info! I don’t think Talbot is offering it but maybe they do just unadvertised. I’m probably like 2 years out from starting a doctoral program in the UK if I get in so I’m hoping to get a good jump on German soon…
What kind of grammar program did you use for the comp?
thanks again.. your blog has been so tremendously helpful so far.
Monday, 13 April 2009 at 7:34 pm
I think it was German Now v8. I wouldn’t recommend it. I haven’t heard any other recs from others.