As the only German V student at NAHS, senior Danae MarQuand has a serious passion for the German language and culture.

She was born in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, but lives in the US. She plans to study at the University of Kentucky in Lexington upon graduation.

“I’m going to double major in national resources and environmental science and geography and then I’m going to get that bachelor’s degree and that’s going to teach me a lot about environmental science,” MarQuand said. “Then I’m going to go for my masters in public policy and administration urban planning. And I’m going to minor in German because you can’t get me out of that German and if I have the time, philosophy as well.”

MarQuand also enjoys reading and learning new things outside of school. A hobby she likes to do outside of school is trying rare fruit.

“I do a lot of reading, especially about history, which I know it sounds like school,” MarQuand said. “I just love to learn information. Besides, I love rare fruits; getting to try rare fruits and learning about their geniuses and history of how they connected and everything. It’s called pomology, the study of the science of fruit. Science and cultivation.”

Beyond fruits and learning new things, she is also now the chancellor of the German class because she’s a senior. Mrs. Eva Seymour is the German teacher who taught MarQuand everything she knows about German culture and language.

She says that Mrs. Seymour was introduced to her by her brother, who took Spanish.

“The main [reasons] that played into introducing me to German was my brother, talked about how Mrs. Seymour was a loved teacher,” MarQuand said. “She’s the one who teaches German. People just know her even if they don’t take German. And then secondly, [in] Spanish, [you] have to roll your R’s, I can’t, Latin who cares, and French has some hard to pronounce stuff. And so I took German, and you do have to roll your R’s, so that sucks.”

MarQuand shares many funny stories about Mrs. Seymour and one of them was about her students hiding little plastic babies around her classroom and she didn’t see one hiding in the microwave and cooked it.

“Mrs. Seymour is [busy] and got a lot going on, she’s that kind of person,” MarQuand said. “And we love her to death. One time she came into school and she was a little bit more frazzled and she was talking about how she had hit an animal on the way [to school], but she didn’t specify it well enough [of what she had hit], and we thought because of the way she was talking about it, as if it were a person, that she had hit a person on the way to school. We were all like ‘Mrs. Seymour, what?!”

MarQuand talks about her German language and culture admiration and how her teacher, Mrs. Seymour was an inspiring teacher.

“The best [actual] thing Mrs. Seymour did as [both] a teacher and a person, you could tell that she cares and she inspired something in me. I didn’t know that German would be the main thing inspiring me to graduate high school and to even get up and go here everyday; it’s just purely who she is as a teacher and person.”

MarQuand has been to Germany a few times now and would like to go back again. She is even considering moving to Germany if the time is right and conditions are met.

“I do have plans to go back to Germany, I’ve been there twice now, once with my family and once with the school and so I will continue to travel there and [some] German-speaking countries, [specifically] Austria,” MarQuand said. “And if things get hectic, and I feel the need to move to another county, why not to Germany? I love it and I would specifically move to Dresden, the capital of the German Province, Saxony.”

She was a student in period zero, a class where eighth graders from nearby middle schools get to learn a foreign language at the high school and it’s where this all started.

She also discusses how students will be affected if they aren’t offered foreign language as much for their graduation plans. To MarQuand, foreign language is important and showed her a different side of herself.

“A lot of people think that [foreign language] isn’t important and [by] living in America [I can see why],” MarQuand said. “But I understand why people say that. I say [that] it’ll definitely have a negative toll on the school because kids are engaged and they love it even if they don’t come out speaking [the best], they still come out with that cultural intelligence and engagement in their school.”

“I’ve learned about the different provinces in Germany, I’ve been there, I’ve learned about the different German [dialects],” MarQuand said. “There’s a German in Switzerland that’s different from our German. I learned about the process of the German government, I watch the German news everyday, I learned about German philosophy, I learned German history, so it’s not just the [German] language, it’s everything, it’s all encompassing. I listen to German music, I read German books.”

MarQuand talks about how German is the highlight of their day and is a major part of what’s getting through her high school. 

“[By] having German [in my school day] really got me engaged in [school],” MarQuand said. “It added another level of depth to it. [German] is getting me through high school honestly.”

MarQuand is retaking a major German test called the AAPPL, Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages, which she has already taken last year. She has to take it after spring break and is studying the AP rubric to prepare.

“What makes [German] so fun is [because] learning a language is like math. It’s all these little [rules],” MarQuand said. “It’ll be like that one time and then not in the next scenario.”

She enjoys learning new information and is always ready to evolve in the German language and culture. MarQuand talks about how her experience with the new language went and how it’s both easy and hard.

“When you get to a higher level of language it’s like the easiest and hardest thing you’ve ever done because you know the language but [every scenario has different rules to follow].”

“When you start out it’s certain things like this word means this word and this is how you put a basic sentence together,” MarQuand said. “When you get to that higher level it’s German language and culture.”