The Open University
- Start Date: 31 Oct, 2022
- 4 weeks
- Study Content: Videos
Discover traditions and festivals in German-speaking countries and gain the language skills to speak and write about them.
Course Fee: Free
Certificate Cost: See Fees and Eligibility
Course Description
This course is made available through the eLearnAfrica and FutureLearn partnership.
Explore German traditions, festivals, and public holidays
On this four-week course, you’ll explore some of the traditions and public holidays that are celebrated in Germany and other German-speaking countries, and the festivals that punctuate people’s private lives and community life throughout the year.
You’ll learn vocabulary and structures to describe traditions and celebrations with a focus on Christmas, rites of passage, carnival, and a number of other festivals. You’ll consider the feelings they evoke, and the key role these traditions and customs play in the diverse societies of the 21st century.
Develop your knowledge of German grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation in the context of traditional celebrations
You’ll practise using language to give instructions using the passive, revise the use of the verb werden, and work on your pronunciation of some common diphthongs and syllables.
You’ll also focus on the language and structures used to talk about traditions celebrated in the past, revising and extending your knowledge of the perfect and imperfect tense.
Finally, you’ll refine your skills to use the past tense in German by learning to talk about memories of traditions from the past that are important to you.
Improve your German writing skills by producing your own written account
You’ll have the opportunity to produce a written account of a tradition you have celebrated in the past, accessing a wide range of authentic source materials such as audio and video clips to enhance your linguistic skills. This will be further developed by researching and writing about a tradition in a country where German is spoken, equipping you with the skills to research using original German texts and to confidently discuss your findings using your German speaking skills.
This course is designed for those with a good basic knowledge of German (fully at Level A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages ‘Elementary’) who want to improve their German language skills and deepen their knowledge of German culture.
This course will be useful to those who wish to improve their competence in German to help further their career or have a general interest in contemporary German-speaking societies and cultures.
Certificate cost may vary. You will be redirected to the host page for cost and payment options.
The Open University
The Open University (OU) is the largest academic institution in the UK and a world leader in flexible distance learning.
Since it began in 1969, the OU has taught more than 1.8 million students and has almost 220,000 current students, including more than 15,000 overseas. The Open University is rated one of the best in the UK for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey. The OU is one of only four UK universities to have consistently achieved more than 90% in the survey’s history. Over 70% of students are in full-time or part-time employment, and four out of five FTSE 100 companies have sponsored staff to take OU courses.
The UK’s latest Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF 2014) places The Open University in the top third of UK higher education institutions by ‘research power’ ranking. 72% of OU research submitted was assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent.
Regarded as Britain’s major e-learning institution, the OU is a world leader in developing technology to increase access to education on a global scale. Its vast ‘open content portfolio’ includes free study units on OpenLearn, which has had more than 26.7 million visits, and materials on iTunes U, which has recorded more than 60 million downloads. The OU has a 41 year partnership with the BBC which has moved from late-night lectures in the 1970s to prime-time programmes such as Frozen Planet, Bang Goes the Theory, James May’s Big Ideas and The Money Programme.
All Open University Science courses presented on FutureLearn are produced with the kind support of Dangoor Education.
This institution is available on eLearnAfrica through partnership with FutureLearn.
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Effective Date: September 22, 2016