Today is the last day of my current intensive class (B2.1 level, for those of you keeping track), which means that I should have had a test today. However, I decided to skip the test this go ’round, the better to play tour guide to Stan and Judie, who arrived yesterday.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, at least … they did encourage me to go to the class and take the test, but I hadn’t studied the hundreds and hundreds of words this week, since I knew I wasn’t taking the test. And I will admit I am getting a little tired of the tests, so I don’t mind a break. 😉

However, while I’m not doing the intensive class this week, I have started a couple of once-a-week classes at the University of Tübingen’s foreign language center. One class is just practicing spoken German through conversation. Plus, each student has to give a 10 minute presentation on one of the teacher’s suggested topics.The teacher instructed us to tie our topic to something about life in Tübingen, using visual aids (i.e. photos) whenever possible.

The topic I signed up to talk about was “photography.” So,  I will need to give a 10 presentation about photography and life in Tübingen, using photos to illustrate it. Ah, you can see the challenge that I have with this topic:  I only have 10 minutes for my talk.  See, that will be a challenge.

Anyway, the other class at the university is an hour’s practice with German pronunciation. At the first session, the instructor listened to each of us speak for a few minutes and then gave us tips on what sounds we need to work on. I need to work on most things, but oddly enough I was able to correctly pronounce the “st” cluster in German when I spoke to her. In German, the “s” at the beginning of word, before another consonant like “t” or “n” is pronounced as “sh”, not as “s” as it is in English.

However, I now seem to want to use that “sh” pronunciation for English words, like “snooker”. For the record, “snooker” is not pronounced with an initial “sh” sound in English.

Anyway, the instructor listening intently to our pronunciation had put me in mind of the character Henry Higgins, the speech teacher in “My Fair Lady.”   But I hadn’t intended to reference that when writing about my post about my new classes.

However, when reading an article about the snooker world championships the other day, it turned out that last year’s champion, John Higgins, was defeated in a match last Saturday by his former training partner. This prompted Chris to wonder if the training partner had originally been singing Just You Wait, [Henry] Higgins during their original training session. That song is from My Fair Lady — Eliza Doolittle sings it when she’s struggling with her English pronunciation lessons with Henry Higgins.

Cute. I’d like to point out that Chris came up with this crazy Broadway show tune reference in this instance not me.

Anyway, I decided since Henry Higgins references kept cropping on, I should put this song on the blog. However, I had a hard time finding a professional version of it in English (lots of high school productions of My Fair Lady are available – your mileage may vary). I did eventually find a posted clip from the movie version in English.

But before I found that, I happened across a German dubbed version of the movie, which is pretty well done, too. And kind of fun, too, for me to see how they translated the English pronunciation lesson part into German.

So, in honor of my new German pronunciation lessons, and in light of last year’s snooker champion being dethroned, I give you both versions of that My Fair Lady song below.

English version of Just You Wait (starts at 2:59)

German version of Just You Wait (starts at  1:05)

Just you wait, I’m sure that after a 10-week pronunciation course, my German pronunciation is bound to be a little better. And perhaps somewhere along the way I’ll also reacquaint myself with the proper English pronunciation of snooker. 😉