Between Marcy and Kevin, Theun feels substantially less awkward than he feared about using the Philly/Boston reading room. He brought his notes, but while none of the others are there, he's going to focus on history first.

Julian arrives, looking a bit winded, and positions himself by the entrance to the reading room waiting to be let in. 

The muggleborn from the class is a bit late and gets turned around, then sees Julian in something like the right area. She asks, "Oh, hey. I forgot your name, sorry. Is this the right place for that German study group?" In german.

"Julian Chan. And, yes, I think so? I was told this is the Boston reading room." 

Marcy waves them in. "Good morning!" she says in German with, for some reason, a French accent. "German study I. Immersion, yes?"

"I'm Wendy Kholer... Boston is an enclave? Would it be rude-" Oh!

"Good morning! Immersion, yes."

"Good morning. Has anyone found the books for the old German? I was doing yesterday the other things." 

Oh good, Marcy invited them in before he had to.

"I did not look, I worked on other classes, though I think my notes will help much. How should we mix modern German lessons and the older class version?"

 "I the wordbook!" she waves her friend the dictionary, which is Middle High German with commentary on later evolutions.

"The class will later get newer, yes? So maybe now we do the old German, later the modern."  Is Marcy getting any of this? He hopes Marcy is getting this. 

"Yes, good."

"Ah by the way, you would say, 'Has anyone found the books for Old German'? I think, at least. I am afraid of Old German..."

"Old German not be afraid! Words is words."

"Fear is good! Fear builds the mana!" Julian is not remotely this confident, but his whole strategy for staying alive means building up a reputation for being clever, and there's no time like the present. "We should start with the first readings, I think."  

"Are. One word is word. Many words are words. Grammar is important? Okay. First reading, okay. Who has the book?"

Does she? She starts digging through her backpack.

"It is unfriendly that we start with the old and work toward the new. The Scholomance is not being very helpful to students learning German. But yes, we can start with the readings."

He produces his textbook, which he did not take particular precautions with, and flips it open.

Julian has the book! Julian will start rattling off a passage from the Nibelunglied and a metrical English translation! He's trying his best to sound like he's doing this off the cuff and didn't spend several hours working on it last night. 

"One is, two are, many are. Thank you." Marcy also has her textbook and listens carefully to Julian.

-There's the textbook. And a notebook.

Aaaah homework. That will try to kill her if she doesn't do it. She pays close attention and tries to transcribe it into a more modern form as Julian goes, muttering under her breath. She keeps falling behind and skipping lines to catch up, her Mom didn't tell her that many stories in German.

Marcy's spelling is absolutely heinous and a lot of the "glue" words are omitted, but she keeps up and doesn't worry too much. She can go back and fix it later with less trouble than fixing missed lines.

Theun, who is not quite fluent with this era of German, raises an eyebrow at Julian's speed, but no more than that. He has an alternate suggestion for one or two parts of the translation, and attempts to explain why in a mix of modern German and English.

Falk shows up and Theun beckons him in. He's fairly quiet, though, except when someone has a slip-up in their modern German.

Marcy's pretty quiet and focuses on picking up vocabulary. In her experience it's best to be very deliberate in acquiring words but let the grammar come naturally from exposure, building an aesthetic sense rather than memorizing a list of rules.

While he's reading, Julian is mostly paying attention to Theun to see if he's likely to offer corrections. He's gracious about it, of course, since Theun actually knows the language and more importantly is an enclaver, but he also doesn't want to seem incompetent. "The books translations are not so good as poetry, are they?"

"You can not even translate modern English and Shakespeare and keep the meter without changing many words. They are too, er, literal, these translations."

"It is – " agh, this is really stretching Julian's German fluency – "It is the wrong focus for us, yes? We translate for magic, so the meter matters, the sounds matter."