German 1Z06 is a first-year two semester long course (hence the 06) that teaches the basics of German grammar and some common conversational sentences. Units covered include easier things like the numbers, telling the time and learning how to pronounce stuff. More difficult units include giving directions, the three grammatical cases and past perfect/simple past tense.
Overall, I didn't find this class to be that bad. The work load was pretty light and consisted of a few exercises every other day out of the text book, which can literally take 30 seconds. There were also a few short one paragraph writing assignments and maybe 10 quizzes total spanning both semesters.
As to German itself as a language... it's kind of complicated. Unlike French, there are three grammatical genders (Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter), which aren't exactly intuitive. For example, a boy is masculine, a woman is feminine, but a girl is neuter.
Also, a lot of the grammatical constructs depend on whether the object in question is in motion or not. For example, take this sentence - the car has come. In German this would be "Das Auto ist gekommen". This literally means "The car is came". Now take this sentence "Die Katze hat gegessen". This literally means "The cat has eaten". The difference is because to be coming you have to be in motion and to be eating, you can be stationary... ya it's kind of confusing. I often found myself confused with some verbs (i.e. You would use the 'is' form with the German verb "Bleiben" meaning "to stay"). So basically, if the verb can be applied to a vector, you use it. This isn't consistent either... bleiben becomes the "have" form when you're talking about where an object is...
... So you practically need to understand some vector math to speak this language
.
There is also a special imperative verb form used specifically for yelling at people or giving them instructions... but I won't go into that :p.
Anyway, the course breakdown is like this:
- Class Preparation, Attendance and Participation (incl. Homework) 25%
- Quizzes 10% 2 Tests (1 per term) 10%
- 4 Writing Assignments (2 per term) 10%
- Mid-term Test 20%
- Final Exam 25%
There is also a single one hour tutorial per week. It wasn't anything difficult... we mostly played word games or did dictation type things.
The professor for this course is Nikolai Penner, and I'm pretty sure he teaches at least 80% of the German courses offered at McMaster. He's a pretty cool guy and knows pretty much everyone in the class by name. He also tends to mark things and answer questions on webCT ridiculously fast.
Don't let my review scare you away from this course, it's actually a lot easier and more interesting than it sounds. I pulled an 11 while nearly being in a comatose state due to the early morning classes.