A Breakthrough With My German

08 Saturday Jun 2013

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Long time readers of this blog will know all about my struggles with the German language since I arrived in Germany two and a half years ago.  I started out disliking German quite vehemently, gradually made my peace with it and am now at a point where I quite like it.  On Thursday, I experience a breakthrough with my German, where for the first time ever I was able to spend the day functioning quite well in German, including in two unique situations, without needing to rely on English at any point.

Thursday morning saw me at my GP’s explaining to him in German about three different health problems.  I’m quite sure my doctor had consumed a large amount of caffeine prior to seeing me as he spoke incredibly quickly and it was a real struggle to keep up with him, but somehow I managed.  I was referred to three different specialists during the course of my appointment, but only one of them I need to see with any great urgency.  I was also told by my GP during the appointment that I did not require a referral to see the specialist.  Once back at the office, I rang the specialist I need to see asap and was told by the receptionist that I do indeed need a referral.  This required a phone call to my GP to organise a referral and then another call to the specialist to make an appointment after I secured the referral.

Thursday lunch time I went to go and organise ordering some blinds.  I have lived in my apartment for just over 2 years and in that time I had done nothing about purchasing any blinds, due to a lethal combination of not having the language skills and procrastination. I was pretty sure that this would be the point at which my German would totally fail me since when does one practice talking about blinds in German class? However, I managed to get through it totally fine except for one point where I didn’t understand what the lady at the store was asking me, but she was able to simplify it so I could understand. What she had asked me was if I was a new customer, but in a way I had never heard before and completely differently to how that question is normally phrased.

I have to admit I was pretty proud of myself tackling these two situations completely in German.  What helped a great deal is that for the whole day I listened to German radio and podcasts, so that my brain was completely in German mode.  It made it so much easier to function in German than when my brain is in English mode and I need to switch to German.

I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, fluent in German yet.  I still have quite a way to go before I reach that point, but now it doesn’t seem as impossible to achieve as it did before. I just need to keep doing a little bit of work every single day, improving my weakness, working on my vocab and most importantly, not giving up. I can do this.

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Learning German Through Music

29 Wednesday May 2013

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As you know, I’m on a quest to find the most enjoyable ways I can improve my listening comprehension in German so that improving it doesn’t turn into a chore.  So far I’m enjoying listening to the radio, podcasts and audio books, but I just stumbled across a really fun website that helps improve your listening comprehension through music called Lyrics Training. The idea is a simple one: select the language and the level of difficulty and then the site plays you a youtube video of a song in that language and you have to fill-in the blanks in the lyrics.  The languages they have on offer are: English, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese & Spanish.  You can also choose to have the lyrics sheet with only 10% or 25% of the lyrics missing or you can ramp it up to Expert mode where you have to type in all the lyrics.  Also, you can choose the type of music you really enjoying listening to or let the site choose the music for you.

The only real downside of the site is that it isn’t particularly user-friendly to begin with. Working out how everything works is really a matter of trial and error and there are no instructions on the front page to tell you how it all works. There is a help button on the Play page that tells you how to listen to the last line again or skip a word if you don’t know it, but an FAQ that tells you how the whole site works would be a handy addition.

The bonus of this site is discovering new music in German (or whatever language you are learning).  Since I discovered it yesterday I have added Die Toten Hosen’s classic song Tage wie diese to my You Tube favourites

And discovered a German language version of Gangnam Style which really needs to be seen to be believed.

If you have used Lyric Training or decide to give it a go, let me know what you think of it.  Also, if you know of other fun ways that I can improve my listening comprehension, please tell me in the comments.

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Getting Back Into My Languages

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in German Language, Life

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After the absolutely amazing Polyglot Conference, I’m re-energised and motivated to get back into my language learning which had fallen by the wayside after I completely burnt myself out studying for my Zertifikat Deutsch.  One of my major downfalls was making language learning seem like a chore by spending an hour every single day revising vocab on Memrise.  While Memrise is a great way to learn vocab, I took on way too much and had made the whole task arduous and absolutely boring. Little wonder I didn’t want to have anything to do with it after my exam was over.

This time, I’m aiming to put some fun back into my language learning.  My listening comprehension is by far my weakest skill, so it is this skill I’m focusing the most on over the next two months.  In the mornings, I now turn on my computer and listen to Deutschlandfunk, an online German talk radio station, whilst I make my morning porridge and check my emails.  Depending on what the day has in store for me, I also leave it on whilst working.  For my commutes, currently to and from rehearsals & performances, but also to & from work once I’m back in the office full-time, I have loaded up Grüße aus Deutschland on my iPhone.  At just 10 mins per episode, it is an easy and quick way to get in some listening practising whilst sitting on the U-Bahn. During the afternoons, I have resumed listening to DW’s Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten, first without the text, then with the text. Then as I’m getting into bed ready to sleep, I have downloaded an audio book in German from Audible.de to listen to.  My first audio book is Der König von Narnia (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe) – a book I know very well in English, so hopefully it won’t be too difficult to follow the German version.  Also, the narration is extremely clear which is a plus.  I am also aiming to watch more German language TV as I have stopped doing that in recent months, plus I’m still continuing to read children’s books in German.  This month’s book is Tintenherz.

It might all sound like a lot, but each element is only takes about 10 -20 minutes and is easily incorporated into my day without any great effort.  I’m hoping that in 8 weeks I will see a clear improvement in my listening skills.

I’ve also started learning Esperanto, but am taking it slowly as to not overdo things.  The website Lernu has courses for free to take you from complete beginner to advanced.  So far, I’ve only done 2 30 minute sessions, but I’m finding Espernato fairly easy and quite fun.  I will see how I feel about it once I’m beyond saying ‘It is a table’ and ‘She is a woman’.

My French is on a mini-hiatus until I work out the best way to tackle it.  I was debating about some courses at the Volkschule, but most of the seem to clash with my German classes.  With the ones that don’t, I need to work out if it is a good thing for my brain to be doing language courses 3 nights straight a week. I’m not entirely sure it is.  However, I don’t feel like I will be able to learn French through self-study alone.  For the time being though, I’m just playing some vocab games in French for a bit of fun til I can make a decision.

It feels good to be motivated about my language learning again.  I like having a sense of purpose and direction as well as a bit of structure.

As always I appreciate any feedback about my language learning methods.  If you know of a fun way to improve listening skills, please let me know.

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A PolyNot’s Review Of The First Ever Polyglot Conference

25 Saturday May 2013

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Polyglot Conference Attendees. Photo Credit: Ray Yap

Back when I was really struggling with my German, a Google search about how to learn a foreign language brought me into contact with the Polyglot community on You Tube.  Their videos and blog posts gave me a much needed boost in motivation to continue on with my German instead of throwing in the towel.  When I heard that they were holding their first ever conference in Budapest, Hungary, I signed up to attend and then I had many reservations about going.  Who was I, a PolyNot who spoke conversational German (just barely) and tourist-level French, to be going to a conference full of people who spoke at least 5 foreign languages? I really had no business being there, but I wanted to hear some of my favourite You Tube Polyglots speak and was hoping it would give me a much needed boost in motivation after I burnt myself out completely studying for my B1 Zertifikat Deutsch back in February.  However, I honestly expected that no one would speak to me there and I would feel really embarrassed about my lack of skill in learning foreign languages.

My experience at the conference was nothing like how I feared it would be.  No one at the conference made me feel bad about the fact I only speak one foreign language, in fact, it was the exact opposite.  Most people gave me lots of encouragement to keep on going with my German & French and to start learning the languages that I had been thinking about learning. They only really cared that I loved learning languages, not that I was really crap at actually learning them.

The speeches I heard over the weekend were so inspiring and motivating that I wish I could bottle up all the emotions I experienced listening to them and share them with everyone I know. The speeches will be going up on You Tube in the coming weeks, so I will be sharing my favourite ones here on my blog. I don’t want to spoil any of the speeches about talking in-depth about them beforehand so this review is light on the conference content, but know they were amazing and I can’t wait until they are up on You Tube so I can watch them all again.

Coming away from the conference I am once again motivated to get back into improving my German and to keep on learning French.  I’ve also decided (maybe stupidly) to add some other languages into the mix.  The first one is Esperanto – the reason behind this is it is a fairly easy language to learn.  Apparently 150 hours of learning Esperanto will put you at the same level as 2000 hours of learning German.  Also, it gives you a really good head start in learning the grammatical structure of other foreign languages.  I spoke to a couple of German speaking Esperanto speakers & they all agreed that learning Esperanto would help me tackle German grammar.  Next, after listening to a very moving speech on Endangered Languages by Susanna Zaraysky  I decided to try my hand at learning Scottish Gaelic to get in touch with my heritage and culture – and also because the language sounds just awesome.  Lastly, I’m going to tackle Arabic.  This language has been on my ‘I want to learn this’ list for quite some time but I was scared of the Arabic script for starters.  However, after buying Learn to Read Arabic from its author Judith Meyer who makes the overwhelming seem quite manageable I’m determined to give it a try.  Of course, I won’t be learning all these languages at once, but rather I will be adding them in slowly over the remainder of the year.  German will still take centre stage.

The next polyglot conference will be taking place in Montreal & NYC in October 2014 and I am going to make every effort to be there.  Also, I want to get my French up to a decent level by this time so I can immerse myself in the French culture in Montreal.  If you love learning languages, no matter how many or how few you can speak, I recommend trying to make it there as well.  The Polyglot community is so welcoming, friendly and full of some of the most interesting people you will ever meet, that I encourage all language enthusiasts to become a part of it, even if you are a PolyNot like me.

* Thanks to Anthony Lauder who coined the term PolyNot to describe language learners like himself (and me) who are not language learning experts like polyglots are.  I just love this term.

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The Healthier Me Challenge Progress Report : Week 1

13 Monday May 2013

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Health

Health (Photo credit: Tax Credits)

It has been one week since I embarked on the Healthier Me Challenge and so far I’m doing well, although I realise it is still early days yet.

I am eating way better than I used to and have cut out nearly all the Coke I was drinking, except for a couple of glasses on Friday night and a 500mL bottle on the Saturday.  Compared to the almost 1L I used to drink per day, this is a significant reduction.

I have kept up my promise to go for a 30 minute walk every day, in fact I’m walking 35 minutes every day (I do a set route of 3.8km) and since I started the Healthier Me challenge my Runtastic app is telling me I have walked 41.52km and apparently burnt 2,010 calories. This hefty number includes not only my 35 minute daily walks but also my walks to the gym (a round trip of roughly 5km) and a 10km walk on Saturday.

Speaking of the gym, I managed to get there twice this week. I was shooting for three times, but only managed twice. Since two times a week is what I promised myself I would do, I’m happy with that.

Doing all this good stuff has resulted in a weight loss of 1.2kg.  I’m happy with that number as it seems to be what most recommend as a healthy weekly weight loss, plus I’m trying to create a diet that I can stick for the rest of my life rather than drop weight fast (and then put it all back on when I start eating ‘normally’).

The more telling snapshot is going to be in a month’s time when I’ve had time to settle into this new way of living.  It’s also going to get shaken up by me going to a conference in Budapest this long weekend and the week after that spent travelling for work when access to healthy food and time to exercise is going to be compromised. How I’m tracking come mid-June is going to be interesting.

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Want To Help Get Good Music Made?

08 Wednesday May 2013

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jess mcavoy

Jess McAvoy (Photo credit: the apostrophe)

If you are anything like me, you grumble about the crap music that gets made on multi-million dollar record labels. Music that has been auto-tuned so much that very little original sound remains and with lyrics that sound like someone just picked random words out of the dictionary and thought that will do. There is a reason why I don’t listen to the radio much these days.  I want music to move me, to speak to me and to (at times) tear me up inside.  Most music on the radio simply does not do that.

Therefore, I look elsewhere for my music.  I was fortunate to live in Sydney back when we had a kick-ass live music scene.  A music scene that is now the former ghost of itself thanks to pubs that hosted live music acts being forced to shut down because they made too much noise (WTF!).  I was also fortunate to have friends who were able to hunt down great music acts and then invite me along to go see them.  That’s how I discovered Jess McAvoy.  Ok, that is slightly a lie, I discovered Jess McAvoy because she was touring with Ani DiFranco, but the Sydney music scene meant that Jess had somewhere to play when she ventured up from Melbourne.  The Sydney music scene meant that I got to witness this amazing singer-songwriter many times over the years before both of us left Australia.

Jess is now living in Canada and is wowing audiences there and in New York, but because her music isn’t the bland, kinda sounds all the same music you hear on the radio, she doesn’t have a multi-million dollar record label footing the bill for her new album.  Like many independent artists, Jess is trying to get her next album made through direct funding.  She has set up an Indiegogo campaign and is trying to raise $30,000.

Before I ask you to chip in a few dollars to help some amazing music get made, I want to show you what Jess is capable of.




Donations start at just $5, which is about the price of a Starbuck’s coffee.  $15 will get you the digital download of the new album and the perks go up from there.

If you have any loose change spare, please consider donating it to Jess to help get some great music made.  The world needs more music like this.

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The Healthier Me Challenge

06 Monday May 2013

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Whilst in Greece, despite eating meals like this:

My dinner tonight - an entire grilled squid stuffed with feta cheese & roasted peppers. It was amazing.

(Grilled calamari stuffed with feta cheese & roasted peppers, for those of you who are curious), I lost almost 2kg.  Why?  Because the majority of my meals were healthy and unprocessed, I walked every day and I cut down on the amount of Coke I was drinking and increased the amount of water.

Therefore, I decided to keep doing this at home – eat as healthy as possible and try to reduce or cut out all the processed crap, walk at least 30 minutes every day, go to the gym at least 2 times a week and cut down on the Coke & increase the water intake.

Also, right before I left for Greece I found out that my cholesterol level is high. The doctor thought this might be an anomaly, so is going to re-test me in August, but I know it isn’t.  Therefore, I’m trying to reduce my cholesterol through diet and exercise rather than having to go on life-long medication. The diet I’m using as a template is the Portfolio Diet as various studies have shown it effective at reducing cholesterol.

Today is officially Day One, although I have been trying to eat better since arriving home from Greece. I’m using My Fitness Pal to track my food intake. Even though I hate counting calories, I know this is the best way for me to learn what to eat, what not to eat and in what amounts. I’m also using Runtastic to track my daily walks as it plugs into My Fitness Pal so saves me from having to try to calculate and add my daily walks into it.

So far I’m loving the new diet – porridge made with light soy milk for breakfast and this amazing home-made seafood salad for lunch (just 150 calories!)

Enjoying a homemade seafood salad for lunch #healthiermechallenge

I’m planning on having some herb encrusted salmon with vegetables for dinner using a fish herb mix I brought back from Greece. If nothing else, I’m hoping to get back my love for experimenting in the kitchen from this new way of eating.

I will try not to become annoying about this new way of living, but I will be blogging perhaps once a week about it, as accountability is important when trying to change habits and so I’m holding myself accountable to the whole internet.

If you have thought, now that spring is here (in the northern hemisphere) and is practically shouting ‘come outside & enjoy the sunshine’, that you want to also start a healthier me challenge involving whatever it takes to make a healthier you, let me know.  I’m an awesome cheerleader.

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I’m Allergic To Springtime in Germany

02 Thursday May 2013

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In Australia, I never suffered from hay fever.  I looked sympathetically on as my friends sneezed and sniffled their way through spring. However, once I moved to Germany and spring arrived, my nose started to run producing an alarming amount of mucus.  I was hoping perhaps it was a once-off.  However, on Tuesday evening when I arrived home from Greece (I will post about my vacation soon, I promise), my nose started to once again become a mucus-producing factory. I swear I’m currently single-handedly keeping the tissue companies in business.

I have no idea what I’m allergic to here.  Obviously, it is something that we don’t have or have much of in Australia.  The pharmacist I begged for something to stop the mucus, theorised that I might be allergic to birch. He might be right as I don’t think we have the abundance of birch trees in Sydney as we do in Hamburg.

I’m hoping that the tablets the pharmacist gave me works as my nose is getting rubbed red raw from me blowing it all the time. I’m so over this hay fever thing. If anyone has any suggestions to combat hay fever, I would love to hear them. Otherwise spring is going to become a very miserable time for me, which is a pity as I love watching the scenery change daily as all the trees regain their leaves and the neighbours plant their new flowers.

Speaking of springtime in Germany, this clip from the Producers came to mind as I was writing this post.  It’s so wrong, but so funny.

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Off On Holidays

19 Friday Apr 2013

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I am heading off on a long-ish (10 day) holiday very early tomorrow morning (the 4am wake-up call is not going to be pretty) and therefore I will not be blogging until my return.

I am hoping that Vodafone did not lie to me and I will be able to use my phone whilst there.  If they are telling the truth, then I will be active on Instagram and Twitter, so you can follow along with all my adventures there. If Vodafone are complete liars, then I may go slightly insane as I will be with my parents, since the whole reason for this holiday is to meet up with my parents who didn’t want to come to Germany. However it ends up, I will be seeing lots of these for the next 10 days and I can’t wait!!

English: A column of the Propylaea of the Acro...

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This Week on Instagram

12 Friday Apr 2013

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Very little that is blogworthy has been happening around here, but I’m feeling like I’m neglecting this little blog of mine, so I’ve decided to share with you an emerging passion of mine, Instagram.  For a long time I could take it or leave it, it was handy for sharing photos across multiple social networks at a push of a button but that was all. However lately, I’ve kinda caught the Instagraming bug and have rather enjoy playing around with both my phone’s camera and Instagram to come up with some shots I rather quite like.

So, here’s what has been happening in my world over the past week or so as captured by Instagram.

I dyed my hair a dark red-brown. And yes, this is a very rare photo of myself I feel comfortable sharing. Also note my gorgeous brown bathroom tiles.

The mall below my office building appears to have been invaded by France. I’m really not sure what inspired the sudden outburst of French flags.

I made pumpkin pie spice mix which tastes amazing with mashed sweet potato.

We have been getting some gorgeous sunsets.

My one true love. A massive 600g of it.

It’s my favourite time of year. Tulip season.

If you are also a fan of Instagram, please feel free to follow me at riaynmac.

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