German: update

[lethargic_man]

I haven't posted about my attempts to learn German for a while. When I went to spend two months in Berlin last summer, my understanding of spoken German was, after a year and a half of teaching myself from a book and accompanying CD (and recordings of all the chapters which weren't on the CD kindly made by curious_reader) pretty execrable. I hoped that taking German lessons whilst I was out there might help that.

They didn't. My vocabulary grew a lot, but I still couldn't follow German at natural speed. My understanding of the rabbi's sermons in shul each week only grew from 5% to 15%. Written German I was much better at, as I could take however long I liked to puzzle over each sentence. (I recently tested myself on a short passage from the calendar aviva_m gave me for Chanukah, and could understand 85 out of 98 words.) But since spoken German doesn't come with subtitles (like in one of the Doctor Doolittle books), that does me no good on the streets of Berlin.

Part of the problem might have been because two hour and a half lessons a week did not constitute enough exposure to hearing and speaking German. During the daytime, I was working in the flat of an Israeli, and when her English let communication down, I tended to speak Hebrew, as my Hebrew is better than my German. (On the one hand that was bad, as it meant I wasn't practising German, but on the other, it was good, because otherwise I'm sure I'd now be unable to speak Hebrew for getting German coming out instead.) And in the evenings, it was an uphill struggle for aviva_m and I to commit to speaking German even for quite short periods.

The result of all of this was that I got disenheartened, and since I came back, I haven't learned any more German, and scarcely even practised such as I already have. I did make a brief effort to learn new vocabulary from the abovementioned calendar, but came to the conclusion that even this is counterproductive, because the more words I know, the harder it is to keep myself from forgetting them all, unless I'm constantly using them all, and I just don't have the heart to keep pouring vast amounts of time into trying to keep my German up.

Or at least I don't whenever I'm in the UK; the moment I touch German soil, I regret not being able to speak properly.

And so I've decided it doesn't seem to make much sense to put an effort into learning German until either I move to Germany, or aviva_m and I move into a place together here.