Tanner V.

Learning with Tanner

How we’ll work together

“German has a reputation for being hard, but it is mostly organized: the verb goes where it goes, the case tells you who did what, and once you see the slots you can build any sentence. I teach it like a recipe with rules. We set up the sentence, you say it out loud, and we fix one thing at a time. You will be speaking from the first session, not after you memorize every ending.”

A little background

Tanner’s story

Tanner grew up in Green Bay hearing his great-grandmother's German at every holiday and understanding none of it. He started at UW–Madison as a chemistry major, until a summer job at a brewery in Bamberg put him on a brewhouse floor where nobody switched to English for him. He learned the words for malt, mash and fermentation before he could order lunch, and found that German grammar worked like the recipes he already knew: every piece has a slot and a reason. He came home, switched his major to German, kept chemistry as a minor, and ran the department's weekly Stammtisch conversation table for two years. He still drives out to the Wolf River most Saturdays to fly fish for brown trout.