So, today I finished my current lessons and tomorrow I move on to new Assimil lessons - passive lesson is lesson 89, active lesson is 40. The complete end of the passive phase is so close I can almost taste it!
Since the first post I have also written to an old german friend of mine who lives in Australia, and so far (twice!) I've written only in German. I've looked up a few words, and checked some grammatical genders, etc, but I've already started to do that less. Two reasons are (1) it's just getting easier to recall words and phrases as I'm actively using them and (2) I'm deliberately weaning myself off the crutch of correctness and trying to see if I can find phrases to work around my own limitations. I've only had one response from my friend so far, and he wrote all in English, starting with the phrase "Your German is really good." I didn't let that deter me from responding all in German again!
What else? I've added another German rock band to Rammstein for my daily "drive-time" music selection - Unheilig. When we were living in Germany, this band's song "Geboren um zu leben" ("Born to live") was getting a lot of airplay. The lead-singer is like a stiff, well-dressed version of Peter Garrett in his heyday of Blue-sky Mine "dancing", but the music is great. It's been growing on me - I recommend checking out the lyrics for "Abwärts" ("Downwards") and "Sternbild" ("Constellation") in particular. I find the lyrics simpler and more repetitive than Rammstein, and just generally easy to understand, which makes them good for learning German.
One final thing - while listening to the German program on SBS this morning an lung-specialist Doctor rang up to guess the mystery sound, and also to give his opinion on alternative therapies which was the topic for the day. All normal stuff, except that the guy was obviously not a native German-speaker. In fact, his German seemed to be in the early intermediate stages, but didn't stop him from having a go. It got a bit painful for the listeners when at one stage he struggled to say "It's hard understand your question" and when the host rephrased the question he responded with "Your last question". At this stage the host gave up and just asked the question in English to which the man responded "oh, nein, nein, nein." Pretty funny stuff. It was nice for me to see someone else on the same quest and, especially, that they had the guts to put themselves out there for the radio show. Maybe one day soon I'll torture the audience of the SBS German program myself :-)
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