Not much to report lately. I'd say I've been busy, but I've been lazy instead. I think it's hard to see my way through my time constraints to get to the level I need to be in 4 weeks time, which is only making me waste my time more.
I guess it's partially brought on by my lack of actual speaking practice and the feeling that it's just not frequent enough to improve. I'll try to think of some ways to improve this, but I think I was relying on my German co-workers wanting to speak to me. I still have my one Austrian friend, which is brilliant, but when my German co-workers didn't respond to my email, I died a little on the inside...
OK, that's an exaggeration, but I was, and still am, disappointed by this.
I am meeting up with another Austrian friend this Sunday for the whole day, but we will be with 3 non-German speakers, so I doubt we'll get much chance to speak German, though I'll try, even if it's a little rude. Anyway, this Austrian friend (aka "The Hof") rang me yesterday to confirm some of the details. I think he was calling from the train, and there was also a lot of noise on the line. On top of that, I was in the office at work and felt a little awkward speaking German. However, as usual, the Hof insisted on speaking German! I really appreciate this, and so pushed on. I got through most of it OK comprehension wise, but my speaking was awkward and stilted. Sigh. The only spot where he switched to English was when he mentioned a suburb name, but with the noise in the background, the bad line, and a little bit of an accent, I got lost on this whole phrase - I thought the suburb name was a German word I couldn't understand!
I told him as much and he had a good laugh and we switched back to German. After that, my speech was a little better, so I guess I should try to have a laugh at myself earlier on in our conversations :-)
As I walked out of work yesterday I did a little reflection. Perhaps my spoken German level's not so bad considering the actual amount of time I've spent speaking it. Apart from previous classes (which amount to very little actual conversation), I spoke on the tram to a work colleague in Germany for about 10 minutes, and had conversations with various other German people enough to add up to maybe 1 hour in total (I'm be generous here). Then I've met up with my Austrian friends here in Australia (in work and out of it) for a total of maybe 3 hours of actual German conversation. So, despite living in Germany for 6 months while I learnt German, I've spoken German for a total of about FOUR HOURS! No wonder I don't feel prepared for the B2 exam!
Just goes to show you, living in a country is no guarantee of conversing in its language! Another way to look at what I've done so far is that I've spoken 3 times as much German while living in Australia as I ever did while lving in Germany.
This does give me a little boost I suppose. I mean, perhaps I'm not so bad at speaking after all - just bad at practicing to speak!
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