Don't know your den from your dem or your der from your des? Maybe you have that straightened out, but can't disentangle the web of confusion that includes würde, hätte, möchte, sollte, wurde, wäre, worden, geworden, and gewesen?
I'm Alexander Hamilton, an Oxford-educated linguist with 6 years' experience helping private students break down and absorb the wonderfully elegant yet at times quite bewildering German language. I teach in my office/classroom behind The Berlin Book Nook, an English-language bookshop I founded in 2016. I also teach online.
My
students have included architects, actors, art historians, academics,
technologists, designers, poets, composers, producers, scientists,
journalists -
even linguists. Although the language of instruction is English, my
knowledge - or at least understanding of the structure - of various
Germanic, Romance, and Slavonic (as well as some other Indo-European and
non Indo-European) languages has allowed me to set German in the
context of other languages my students may know, whether at native or
non-native level. My youngest student was 13 and my oldest nearly 60.
In
addition to gaining a thorough understanding of how the German
language works, my students progress through intensive exposure to authentic German.
At the beginning, this
means absorbing essential everyday language and structures before moving
on to material covering a wide range of topics and genres. At the
intermediate level and above, you will be able to tackle some of the
most beautiful, complex, and influential German ever written.
The aim is not merely to make increasingly complex language
intelligible to you, but to help you absorb it and deploy it, so that
you speak not just accurately and precisely, but also elegantly, and
with an ever-greater command of the complexities of the language.
I am happy to tailor the subject-matter to any specific professional or other interests you may have.
I
charge 20 EUR for the 90-minute trial session and 60 EUR for each
subsequent 90-minute session. I offer private individuals a package of
ten 90-minute sessions for 500 EUR.
