work on my German

but this is also not a priority right now, and I want to pare my list down to only the most important things.

Big Bro and I conversed in rather halting German for a while last night, and it’s quite shocking how much I’ve forgotten. It does come back when I speak it for a bit, but I wouldn’t really consider myself fluent anymore. Big Bro mentioned Rosetta Stone again, and said he’d get me a copy, so that’ll help – if he comes through this time :-p

We mentioned the possibility of going on another trip to Germany together, too. Maybe back to Karlsruhe, which we both liked, or maybe Hamburg – I’d love to see Hamburg again. It’ll probably be next spring/early summer before we can make it happen, though – I already have more travel plans than I know what to do with between now and Christmas, and taking time off work in the first few months of the new year is verboten. But it’s something to look forward to, and a reason to keep practising the language.

because i have no incentive to work on this in the near future. hopefully one day i’ll go to a grad program where it will be useful.

was a wonderful opportunity to do this. It’s great how quickly a language comes back to you when you start speaking it again. The problem with going for a weekend is that you’re leaving again just as you start to get comfortable with it :-p Big Bro was saying something about an online course for practicing German, must have a look for that.

this is going on the long-term list… I just have not been working on it at all. I could, I should, I’m working on all the others… but I can’t even fool myself that I’m thinking about working on it at the mo… good luck to everyone else!!

all in German on Saturday! I’m trying to figure out how to get myself and my brother to Haigerloch (near Stuttgart) for my uncle’s wedding in September, so I wrote the tourist office there for information. No reply yet, so maybe it was completely unintelligible :-p

Oh my god I just had to speak German!! (well not had to) but we had a German client visit and my German boss was making small talk, and he was like, hey Moose, you speak German don’t you?! I managed to spit out a “nur ein bischen” but at least I understood when the guy was asking for two colour copies of the materials he’d brought with him! phew! Wish I could remember more though!!

on my own this week :( but actually it was really good. We were doing telephone conversations which was really useful, which I guess was interesting.

There are only two weeks left of the course. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we have been going all term. I dunno what I’m gonna do when the course ends. I keep telling myself I want to go to Russian classes instead but am I putting lots of time in on the Russian? erm… nope! It’s like a vicious cycle of putting myself in a position where I have to do something in order to have the fun of trying to get out of doing it! lol@self!

but I really want to make some language progress this year, I really do. not sure where German features in that though. requires thought! and action!!

well it’s taken me all week! but I finally am sending the two postcards today, one to my friend and one actually TO GERMANY!!! woohooo!! It was quite hard but didn’t take too long to write, and now I have the excitement of waiting for postcards to come back! Has it motivated me to study? -yes, in a kinda, looking forward to doing it later when I have time (which I guess is better than not foreseeing studying at all!!)

Improvement!

going ok, but my friend and I had to resort to a glass of wine last night to up our motivation! We’re going to start sending each other postcards in German to try and use some of the stuff we’ve learned, in the hope that it will suddenly make us really enthusiastic!!