Tag Archives: German

Time to Panic

15 Wednesday Feb 2012

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With the mad dash to London the week before last and the play all of last week, learning German has taken a back seat.  I’ve missed three classes in a row, I haven’t read any of my kids books and I’ve stopped reading the paper and listening to my German dialogue CDs.  Last night, I went to my first German class in 2 weeks and it was announced that our A2 test would be the week after next.  Cue me panicking!

I am totally unprepared for this.  Completely and utterly unprepared.  I have felt all through the A2 class that I’m just not keeping up, but thought with my new learn German routine I might be able to pull it all together to pass my test. However, I’m not sure I can pull it all together in just 2 weeks. I’m missing Thursday’s class to do the second week of the play and with it goes all my nights and all my free time until Sunday. I simply feel I don’t have enough time to get myself up to the level I need to be at to pass this test.

So, this is me having a little meltdown. Feel free to ignore the hysterics.

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First Dream in German

27 Friday Jan 2012

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I’ve been dreaming in German for quite a while now but all those dreams have been rehashing the grammar rules I’ve learnt that day or conjugating verbs.  Basically my subconscious trying to make sense of everything I’m learning and consolidating it. However, last night I had my very first dream in German where both I and the other person in the dream were speaking in German. I don’t remember an awful lot about the dream but I was walking up some stairs chatting to the person next to me and what I remember is that even in my dream I didn’t understand every single word that they were saying, but I understood enough to be able to make some kind of reply. It was interesting to see my dream life resembled reality, although it would have been much more cooler if I had been completely fluent in German in my dream world.

I’ve been told that when you start dreaming in another language is when you finally make some kind of breakthrough. I hope this is correct.  For those of you who are conversational/fluent in another language, at what point did you start dreaming in that language? And do you think that it had any relation to what stage of learning that language you were up to?

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The More Frustration, The Better… Apparently

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

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English: Depiction of frustration

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Every time that Benny Lewis posts on his fabulous blog, Fluent in 3 Months, I feel incredibly guilty.  That because he puts all of us language learners to shame by his dedication to speak a language fluently in 3 months.  He somehow juggles working full-time with learning a language and still has an active social life.

But this isn’t a post of how in awe I am of Benny, but instead a reflection on his last post, which talks about getting out of your comfort zone on a daily basis to improve your language learning.  He writes about the frustration we all feel when we try to speak and negotiate our way through life in a foreign language. Instead of looking at the frustration in a negative way, like I’m guilty of, he turns it into a positive.  The frustration you feel is a motivator to improve your language learning.  The more frustration you feel on a more frequent basis, the better.  This is because you are constantly challenging yourself instead of remaining in your comfort zone.

I raise my hand of being guilty of pretty much everything he mentions when talking about staying in your comfort zone: going to class but letting the teacher or other students speak most of the time, only doing homework prescribed to me, not really pushing myself when speaking German and at the end of day bitching to my expat friends in English about how challenging I find German. Guilty as charged!

However, after seeing that I’m doing myself no favours by trying to learn German this way, I’m going to endeavour to frustrate and embarrass myself more in an effort to give my German a good kick along.  I really want to become conversational in German so I can participate more in German life and if that takes some personal pain, then so be it. Will it work? Who knows, but I figure it’s worth a shot.

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Pulling My Finger Out

16 Monday Jan 2012

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Deutsch: Beispiele deutscher Beschilderungen i...

With the failure of my Fluent in 3 Months language challenge and the depressing realisation that everyone in my class speaks better German than I do, I have decided to pull my finger out and get serious about learning German. I know I have talked about doing this, but this time I actually am. I’m actually putting all those grand plans into action and I feel I’m very slowly getting somewhere.

I read out loud to myself a short German children’s story every night and hope like hell the neighbours can’t hear me, but if they can I hope they are enjoying the monster and dinosaur stories of late. If they could shout back some corrections to my pronunciation, that would be fantastic.

I have loaded my iPod with the audio CDs that came with my German textbooks that I have never bothered to listen to, except in class, and every morning and evening on the U-Bahn I listen to them. I’m actually understanding most of what I’m hearing, which I really should since I’m still on the A1 CDs, but still it’s a nice feeling not to be completely lost.

I have gotten a copy of Rosetta Stone and am working my way through it.  I’m still on the basics, but I figure it is a good idea to really consolidate that base before getting to the stuff I find challenging. I’ve already learnt some new words and am slowly getting my head around accusative and dative and how the word endings change.

I still need to increase the amount of German TV I watch and the most scariest for me, increasing the amount of German I speak on a daily basis.  However, I’m determined that 2012 will be the year that I conquer German.

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Improve Your German with a Web Series

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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As you know I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve my German, especially my ability to understand spoken German.

The website Young Germany has a section that is full of great resources to help improve your German. One of these is a web series called Jojo sucht das Glück. The language used in this webseries I would class as upper A2 – B1, but it has subtitles which makes it accessible to people who are able to read German far better than they can understand it, like me.  The story is a little formulaic and the acting is at best quite wooden, but it is a fun way to pick up new words and practice your listening skills if only for the amusement value of all the bad luck the main character Jojo has.  Each episode is only 3 minutes long, so you can watch a couple of episodes during your lunch break or whenever you have a couple of minutes spare.

If you are aware of any other web series created for beginner/intermediate speakers of German, please let me know and I will add them to this post.  It would be great to create a list of fun resources.

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Reading My First German Books

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

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In an attempt to improve my German, I’m starting once more to make an effort to read German children’s books.  Last week, I read my first proper books in German.  Yes, they are still children’s books, but I’ve graduated from picture books to books with chapters!

Reading these books still require me to look up words on almost every page, but I figure this is as good a start as any to improving my German.  Maybe one day I’ll be able to read a book designed for a 6 year old without needing to look up any words. Until that day, it will take approximately 30 minutes to read a 40 page book that only has a few sentences per page.

I went to the library last weekend and got a massive stack of books for me to read over the Xmas/New Year holiday break.  Already, I’ve ‘burned’ through two of them.

I also got some audio books to help improve with my atrocious listening skills.

I’ve started a brand new page on my blog to record all the books I’ve read in German to either encourage or shame me into reading in German more regularly. If you are also at the same point at learning German that I’m at, it might also provide a good guide for suitable books to read.

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Thoughts on Week One

10 Monday Oct 2011

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I have now been speaking German in the office for one week. In that week, I’ve come to realised just how much German I need to learn.  It is a little daunting, but I always knew that the road ahead would not be easy.

With three of my dear friends from Australia visiting over the weekend, I did not watch any German TV, read any German books nor practice any of my vocab.  I basically had the weekend off.  I’m going to give myself a guilt-free pass on that one cause spending time with friends from home definitely trumps spending time learning German.

I also spent Thursday and Friday not listening to any German audio, despite promising to listen to 30mins of German audio every day.  That I will not give myself a guilt-free pass on.  It was sheer laziness. I can’t promise I won’t do it again, but I will do my best not to.

All in all, the first week has been an interesting one; discovering how much German I know, how well I can currently express myself (basically as well as a 2 year old) and realising how much I have to learn (lots).  I’m hoping as this Fluent in 3 Months challenge continues I can begin to see some progress, but at the moment, it is just too early to do so.

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Day 1 of the Fluent in 3 Months Language Challenge

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

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With the Tag der Deutschen Einheit (German Reunification Day) holiday on Monday, yesterday was my first day in the office speaking only German. The good news is that I survived it.  The even better news is that it was nowhere near as difficult as I thought it was going to be.  I thought I was going to be completely lost and unable to have even a basic conversation.  Instead I was able to talk to my boss about our co-worker based in Sweden who had an allergic reaction to some hair growth product resulting in a trip to the doctor’s, what I did over the long weekend and other work related topics.

My German is nowhere near perfect.  I know I’m making a lot of mistakes and that I probably sound like a three year old child. However, I also know that I will improve over time and that the most important thing at this point in time is that I can make myself understood and I can understand what is being said to me.  On that point, I still can’t understand every word of what I’m being told, but I am getting the major gist of the conversation. This too will improve.

The downside of speaking German all day is how tired I am at the end of the day.  I was exhausted yesterday evening.  The 90 minute hardcore grammar session we had in my German class last night didn’t help nor did the two pages of grammar homework I had to plough through. It is incredible the amount of effort and concentration it takes to speak a foreign language. Hopefully this too will lessen as time goes on.

I’m really happy that I’ve decided to do this, to force myself to speak German on a daily basis.  The first month or so is going to be really tough, but hopefully come month 3 I will find that my German has gotten to the point of being conversational.

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Fluent in 3 Months? My New Language Challenge

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

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I’ve been really inspired by Benny The Irish Polygot’s blog Fluent in 3 Months (go read it now!) and now that I’ve decided that I’m staying in Germany, it is time to get off my butt and do something about improving my German.  Therefore, I’m taking some of the tips I’ve learnt from Benny and his amazing blog and adding some of my own and coming up with my new language challenge. Some of the things I have started doing this week, but the main language challenge will kick off on the 1st October.

Therefore, from the 1st October I will:

1. Speak only German at the office.  My workmates are fantastic guys and this challenge is something that they came up with since I’ve now been living in Germany for a year.  It is going to be really tough, but I think speaking only German during the workday is really going to give my German a huge boost.

2. Using Anki, which I’ve loaded on my phone, work through the deck Basic German 2 every single day, thus increasing my vocabularly and reinforcing the words I already know.

3. Listen to German audio for at least 30 minutes every single day.  I will be using Deutsche Welle’s Langsam gesprochen Nachrichten and Radio D for this. Even though the Nachrichten is beyond my current level of German, they do provide a transcript so this will be a good opportunity to hear how words are pronounced, which is something I have a lot of problems with.

4. Watch German TV (with subtitles) at least 3 times a week.  Due to German TV not having subtitles on most channels, I will be using mainly DVDs for this.  I have just brought Coupling (Wer mit wem?), one of my favourite British comedies, so this will get a good workout as will my German language versions of Sherlock and NCIS.

5. Start reading German books. On my bookshelf I have Heidi and the first Harry Potter book in German. I will definitely need a dictionary when trying to read these books, but I’m up for the challenge.

Will I be fluent in 3 months after doing all of this?  Honestly, I don’t think I will be, but I am going to give it my very best try.  If at the end of the 3 months, I’ve only raised my German to the level of conversational, I will be extremely pleased.

If anyone wants to join me in my language challenge, please do.  You don’t have to be learning German, you can substitute it for any language.  Also, if you have always wanted to learn a language, then now is the time to start! You can do challenges 2-5 no matter where in the world you are.

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Was ist grün und sitzen an Klavier?

18 Thursday Aug 2011

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Credit to firehow.com

The group dynamics at Improv have shifted.  When I first started it was made up primarily of expats with a sprinkling of Germans who spoke English.  Now it has changed to half expats and half Germans who speak English, which I think is just awesome.  This also means there is much more opportunity to speak German at the pub afterwards if you so desire.

It so happens that at the pub last night for some unknown and probably very strange reason we started to tell jokes in German. My German is most kindly described as barely functional, but thankfully these jokes were on par with those told by five year olds and using extremely basic vocabulary. Also those telling the jokes spoke very slowly and went over words anyone didn’t understand. Due to this I could understand and laugh along with everyone at the punchline.  It was an awesome feeling to not only understand something in German but be truly part of the conversation, rather than just understanding a word here and there and having no idea what was going on and what everyone is laughing about.

So, was ist grün und sitzen an Klavier?

Kiwi Wonder!

I didn’t say that they were good jokes.

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