re-learn german

signing up for a grad program that will take me back to Germany for 8 months will help a lot! my program’s in english, but I hope to regain the German needed for daily conversation, as well as some more technical vocabulary.

i took the Goethe Institute’s online placement test for their courses. they recommended me for the B1, or low-intermediate course. considering i only ever achieved an intermediate level in the first place, i was pretty pleased with that!

the best way to learn something is to teach it. i’m now teaching (very!) elementary German to 2 people. and i’m recalling a lot for myself in the process.

in Thailand of all places…. there were so many German and Austrian tourists there and i got to listen in on lots of conversations. i’m happy to say that as long as i have some context, i can still understand.

japanese takes priority. but once i score level 1 proficiency, then i’ll start studying German again. i might even use the Goethe Institut’s distance learning program and go to Berlin for a summer. ahh! i want to teach English and German; i’d forgotten how much i’d fallen in love with the German language.

hmm…. i have very little opportunity to speak German in my daily life, and learning Japanese is much more urgent right now. but, i’ve been checking out some more German music and trying to find some German blogs to read. that brings a lot of stuff back. i guess my goal is something more like “maintain my German”... but there’s a lot of relearning to do as well.

i met a girl whose parents are German, so she can speak semi-fluently, plus a Portuguese guy who speaks it as a 3rd language. we’re going to have a Kaffeestunde!! YAAYYY!!!! why learning German excites me so much when i live in a country where i speak even less of the language confuses me but hey. semi-useless languages are cool.