German woes

I'm taking an intermediate German class. After we were a third through the first term, our first teacher disappeared to a full-time job, and our new teacher came. Let me describe her: she is about 6 feet tall, size 6, obviously a runner, and sweet as a summer's day. She is also made of steel and carries an invisible whip made of smiles. You can't decide if you should fear her or take her out for coffee.

I come home from this evening completely exhausted. The exhaustion comes from having had some concepts of grammar I've had in my head for 30 years completely turned on its side, taking my head with it.

Turns out that what I've always fondly called an adjective in English isn't always in German - sometimes it's an adverb. And it wasn't even the subject of the exercise, this dismantling of my understanding; the point was a review of German declinations. Take this example:

The beautiful woman (die schöne Frau)
The woman is beautiful (Die Frau ist schön).

Now, we always learned in school that in sentences where the verb is essentially, "to be", the verb is essentially an equals sign and there's no real predicate - what comes after the verb is equivalent to the subject. And you can't really modify "is" in English. We also learned that anything that describes a noun is an adjective. So in English, both "beautifuls" are adjectives. Turns out that "beautiful" in the second sentence is, in German, an adverb. I'm told this should be clear to be because it's not declined (the "e" missing from "schön" in the second example). But I'm really still trying to get my mind around the concept that, in German, you can modify "to be".

This is made the more earth-moving to me by the fact that I took my first German course in 1991, and you'd think that maybe, just maybe, I'd have gotten this concept down 17 years ago.

I am not well tonight. Wait, I just modified "to be", didn't I? Now I'm really not well.

On top of that she inflicted upon us a particular kind of German academic torture called a "diktat". Not like Dictator, but like dictation. The teacher reads a text, perhaps slowly (yes, this time), perhaps repeating phrases (no, this time), which the students have to write out. German kids start this in first grade; it's actually a subject appearing on their report cards. Being the person I am, I had to ask, WHY? Supposedly, she explained (indirect speech is one place German has English beaten), it trains the children (and childlike foreigners) to write things down automatically, without stopping to agonize over punctuation and spelling.

We wrote the short paragraph and self graded this mini exam (my 10 errors put me far from the leaders in the class, but I suspect some fellow students of undercounting). She announced that she was giving this to us because, when she asked if we had understood every word in the text, everyone nodded immediately. Once again, being the person I am, I had to point out that I had understood the paragraph and all the words in it; my problem is simply atrocious spelling and lack of any sense of German punctuation rules. So sadly, I learned something, but not apparently what my teacher was trying to show me.