improve my German

This year, as well as Latin, I want to focus on relearning German. As a child I had a basic understanding of it which I’ve never forgotten; but because I so rarely use it, so much of it is on the ‘back burner’ and so useless. Time to change!

I have started reading Grimm’s Fairytales in German, and also a German translation of Anne Frank’s diary (it was originally written in Dutch). It’s been really encouraging reading the fairytales—at first it was incredibly slow, with me looking up one of about every seven words, but several tales (and days) on I have really speeded up. I’m only fairly slow now :P

Just finished reading a german grammar book and i’ve learnt quite a lot from it, things that didn’t make sense are now quite clear.
In 2 weeks I’ll be having just under 6 hours of german a week when I start it for A-level at school, this will definitely help with this goal.

woah…
My german has deteriorated extremely rapidly over the past few months.
I really need to get back into practice, I’ve a lot of work to do.

...to see how much ‘latent German’ I actually have in my mind!
I have this temp job as a receptionist, and I’ve answered a few German phonecalls. I started answering that well… I only spoke very little German… but then it started flowing! Words coming out of my mouth that I didn’t even know I knew… And with a near-perfect accent that I didn’t know I had (well, that’s how it sounds inside my head at least) :p Strange experience.

Certainly got me motivated to do something about German!! :D

Genau gesagt, ich will meinen Wortschatz vergrößen sowie meine Fähigkeit der Diskussion und den Aufsatz zu schreiben verbessern.
Ich will mich jede Woche rund um einen Thema beschäftigen, und einen möglichst sinnigen und langen Aufsatz erfassen.

I spent a week in Germany visiting relatives and that sure helped improve my German. But I’m not taking it off the list because it makes me determined to improve further.

I didn’t even remember I KNEW German until I saw this post. My high school teacher had me thinking in German. Don’t use it and you lose it. True in this case. But I can still count to ten…

the difference is that I’m better at German, not because I like it better or studied harder (in fact I like French better), but because German and Dutch just look alike enough for me to understand at least half of what is being said in German without making much of an effort. the extra problem with this one though, is that I don’t really like the German language..
but still I want to be able to speak it properly :P
and because German and Dutch look alike so much, it actually makes it harder to really become good at German. cos some words seem to be the same but then they mean something completely different, or I mess up on the grammar..
but again the question is, how am I going to improve my German?!

I’m over improving… my German needs CPR!

I started writing in my diary in German. I usually write everything in Spanish so now it is written in 2 langauges. It has been a bit hard to explain some things in German but that’s how it was when I started writing in Spanish.