Crno Srce at "Yet Another Language Blog" asked me where my language blog was, so I thought perhaps I would start one. As you can see if you look at my cooking blog, I am not very good at keeping a blog. So it's possible that this will indeed be my first and only post!

Anywho, to German. Currently my German learning is frequent but disorganised. My German classes ended in February and since then I have listerned to the whole of Gruesse aus Deutschland, writen a few emails in German, listerned to some episodes of Alltags Deutsch and slow german, listerned again to Wieso nicht? (or more honestly to my favourite episodes, of which there are many), seen my tandem partner once, talked to a friend in German for 2 and a half hours, done 40 pages of very boring German grammar exercises, listerned to the 12 episodes of the podcast Typische Helene from Club Migros, started an anki deck and regularly studied it, watched various episodes of die Sendung mit der Maus and watched an episode of Das Perfekte Dinner. Alltags Deutsch and slow german are both a little too hard for me at the moment but most of the time I understand something and hear lots of words that I half know, which then increases my knowledge of them, so I think it's probably still useful.

I am lucky (?) that I currently live in Germany so I speak at least some German every day. This week I helped organise the exam for the course I am writing the exercises for. I had originally planned not to speak to any of the students during the exam and instead to ask one of the HIWIs or the PhD student that is also supporting this course to translate but somehow it felt stupid because I understood their questions. So in the end, I answered their questions during the exam and mostly it worked very well. I also argued with them in German about thier marks in the Einsicht (4 hours when students can look at their exams after they've been marked), tho' alot of the time I had to ask them if they spoke English. Anyway, this whole experience has spurred me on to improve my German faster. My job was advertised as not needing previous German knowledge but I still seem to need to speak German quite alot. This makes me feel really uncomfortable because I can't express myself properly and reguarly have to rely on other people, which makes me feel stupid and like I'm not doing my job properly. But hey, so it goes.
Next semester I have to write the questions in German and then have them checked by K (name not included for her anonimity) instead of her translating them, this is terrifying.

Ok. I will now set a goal for this week: meet my tandem partner once, transfer all the words I don't know from the first 30 lessons of Greusse aus Deutschland to Anki, do some Anki every day, transfer all the words I don't know from my last german course to Anki, try to read a Brother's Grimm story and do some grammar exercises about relative clauses. Perhaps I won't achieve all of this. Also, perhaps at the weekend (when I go to Manchester to see my boyfreind :D) , I will persuade my boyfreind to speak to me in German for half an hour (probably this won't happen).

Goals for the year: take and pass a B1 exam. For this it is clear I need to actively improve my writting skills. This will be hard because I hate writing. Everything else is somehow easy to practice and enjoyable but writing scares the hell out of me (strangely also in English which is my native language).

At some point I will write a post about all the free German resources I have found and which I have found useful.

Before I go, incase anyone actually reads this, I appologise for my spelling and grammar, I would normally use a spell checker but somehow it is set to German and I can't figure out how to change it.

Bis zum nächsten mal,
Lorna