Structured Stammtisch: The Truth about Cats and Dogs

Today’s theme is: Pets!
In today’s Stammtisch, we’ll practice describing our fur babies (or feathered babies!) - what do they look like? What are their personalities? What do you find especially lovable and/or what kind of trouble do they get into? Bring a fave photo of your pet(s) (or a pet you wish you had) to show them off to the group.

Fang Reden An meets to practice our German speaking and conversation skills, and to get to know other people who are also interested in German language and culture. Each Stammtisch has a lighthearted theme and activity to facilitate conversation. The themes and activities will be fun and largely just to give us a focus for our conversation and vocabulary practice.

This meetup is part study-group, part conversation club for German learners. The meetup is targeted towards people roughly at A2 to B1 in the CFER scale, but that's not a hard rule: Generally if you can speak a little German but still feel uncomfortable in real-time conversations, you are welcome here.

Some Ground Rules:
Language Immersion - Our goal is to speak German, right? So, to the best of our ability, we will speak only in German. If we aren’t sure how to express ourselves, we can use German dictionaries or sites like [Verbformen.de](http://verbformen.de) to self-correct our grammar, or we can do our best to get our main idea expressed in a different or creative way. We can even use drawings or visual aids.

The goal is to do our very best to avoid relying on English (or AI translations) as a crutch. That said, this group is not intended for advanced speakers, so once we’ve made a good faith effort to stay in German, English as a last result is okay.

Safe Space to Speak - Speaking with real people in a language you’re still learning can be stressful. All of us will make grammar mistakes, will forget our words, or say something silly. It's okay! So please be kind: don’t poke fun at people and don’t discourage people. It is a good idea to ask someone if they are open to receiving corrections before just correcting them. If you do give corrections, be gentle about it.

Kindness and Respect - Rudeness, disrespectful behavior, bigotry and hatefulness will not be tolerated. Please note this group is also explicitly LGBT+ friendly.

Keep it Light - Let’s avoid stressful or controversial topics and lets be sensitive if someone says a topic is uncomfortable or potentially triggering for them