I met up with my Austrian friend at work, along with the Australian co-worker who's married to an Austrian and speaks German reasonably well. It almost didn't happen because I lost track of time completely, but we got there in the end. My confidence hasn't improved at all, in fact, it might be worse than before. I'm even forgetting things I used to know. Not good. As you might be able to tell, I'm not feeling good about a mid-July target anymore, and I just really haven't found the time lately to make solid progress in my "sit-down" studies. As you may have noticed, I haven't had an Assimil update for a while because, well, I've been slack and I haven't really made any progress. I did a translation a couple of weeks ago of an article with audio, and I've listened to that a bit, and read it a bit too, but nothing really focused. I'm working on a new article at the moment from Deutsche Welle's "Alltagsdeutsch" which I'll hopefully have ready soon.
On the weekend I took "The Hof" along with some other mates on a rogaine. We didn't speak in German much because we spent most of the time as an English speaking group. At the end of a 6-hour rogaine, I tried to chat a little, but I was just shattered. I did learn a new word - "der Hügel" - which I was given as a translation for knoll. Now that I look at it on Linguee I see that perhaps ein Hügel is too big for a knoll. Apparently, the English word knoll is cognate with the German word "die Knolle" which means "tubers, bulbs, lumps". The dictionary.com definition is "a small, rounded hill or eminence; hillock". Linguee gives "die Kuppe, das Hügelchen, niedrieger Hügel". So, yeah, a small hill :-)
This week, the plan is to meet up with my Austrian friends for some more focused German-time, and also to get back into training for the 14km City2Surf here in Sydney. I've decided to count my 20.2km walk+jog on Sunday as my training for last week!
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