About your instructor
My name is Pia Banzhaf. I grew up in Germany in a multi-lingual family, starting out with English for the first five years of my life and then adding German to it when I went to school.
In high-school I studied Latin for 4 years, and learned French and a little Spanish. When I was sixteen I tried unsuccessfully to learn Russian via a distance course on TV. I tried to learn Arabic, too, also without a classroom setting, just from a book, which like Russian did not work out well. I still plan on learning the basics in both of these languages and believe that a classroom setting would make all the difference.
Later, at university I took Italian, and a semester each in Chinese and Vietnamese. I studied Japanese for three years in Japan with a private instructor. Can you tell I am a language learning enthusiast!? I just love learning languages and hope to keep learning new ones and practice the acquired ones. It all just needs so much time!
Since I love learning languages, I love teaching them as well. That is one of the reasons why I became a teacher for German and English as foreign languages . I graduated from the University of Dortmund with a teaching degree and taught a few years in grade schools before making Newfoundland my home in 2004. I have been teaching with the MUN German Department since 2007. Compatibilities of degrees being an issue world wide, I am now completing a graduate degree in German literature at MUN to obtain a degree that is recognized in Canada, maybe as a step to further studies.
I am very much interested in e-learning and constructionist approaches to teaching and hope you will find this website useful in your studies.
In this course, I hope to infect you with my love for learning languages, in this case German!
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