Weichnachtsgeschenke...

Before two weeks pass into the New Year, I should do a bit of an update!

I scored at Christmas! My Austrian friends were getting a visit from their parents and so they had them bring over a couple of books for me - just some normal Bestseller, sold-in-airports types of books, but they're just what I've been looking for. The one I started on was from a German author from my old hometown (or rather, where I lived for 6 months) - Frankfurt am Main. It's called "Der Beobachter" by Charlotte Link. At 650 pages all, I have to admit that I found the prospect daunting. To be honest, I rarely read fiction books in English, and I'm hardly a super-fast reader as it is, but I've got through 60 odd pages already and I'm really enjoying it. There have only been one or two passages where the meaning was a little unclear to me. This is not to say there haven't been many words I haven't understood. There've been plenty! I intended to add unknown words to my Anki list, but so far I only managed to add those from the back and inside covers and the first couple of pages. It just takes a lot of time, and it's time I could be spending actually reading the book. Still, I should do it every now and then because words do pop up multiple times. Perhaps I'll make that my rule - if it pops up twice, and I don't know it, I'll write it down somewhere so I can add it to Anki later.

I also got another fat novel and two children's books in German as gifts from my parents for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading the children's books to my daughter!

I did manage to keep studying German throughout the break too, despite working between Christmas and New Year's and the rest of the time mostly being about family things. I made sure I stayed on track with Anki as a minimum. I went to a BBQ with my wife and daughter to my Austrian friends' house and had a chance to talk to their visiting parents and sister. The parents spoke no English, so it was a good opportunity. They were lovely and I really enjoyed talking to them. They took a while to speak to me too much. They probably weren't sure how much I would understand. I had to remember too that Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which is pretty much all I understand, is just about no one's actual first language. If I hadn't been there, they would have been speaking "in dialect" as they put it. My friend's mother was really nice and, for the first hour or so at least, spoke to me really, really slowly :-)

Unfortunately, apart from this language practice, and once at work between Christmas and New Year's, I haven't had much practice lately. It looks like I'll have more of a chance in mid-January but I've been accelerating my efforts in other areas, with the goal, of course, of getting ready for a Goethe exam sometime soonish. This means I need to be intensify this area as well. I've been giving this a little thought and hope to come up with something soon.

Some other news - I finally did another lesson from Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Using German) - lesson 18 complete! I had decided not to do it anymore, but since my speaking practice has dropped off a bit, I figured I may as well do some more as a weak substitute. It's better than nothing! I think now that I've left it for so long I realise that I've been enjoying real world material more and it's probably more useful for building the vocabulary I really want. However, as a source of parallel translations with recordings all already prepared, it's hard to beat for the drive to work.

Oh yeah, and I realised the other day that I bought Lesetraining B2 in mid-March (got it early April I think?) and I hadn't even finished the first half of the book, which contains tests that get progressively harder in order to prepare you for the second half, which is the real practice tests. I'm not sure how much of a difference in difficulty there really is, but anyway, I recently finished all of Part A! That includes adding any vocab I didn't know to my Anki list. When I think back to how hard I found some of the first lessons, I realise that I've come a long way. Today at lunch I also did the first part of the first question in Part B. Got 5 out of 5, did it in 10 minutes (15 would be available in the exam), and added the roughly 10 words I either didn't know or just wasn't 100% sure about to my Anki list. I plan on using my time better to get through the rest of these sample questions before I've had the book for a year!

I suppose that's part of the reason why my posts have become less frequent (if that's possible). And with that, I'll sign off so I can continue to work on the first New Year's Resolution that I've made in a long time - to get to bed earlier. Not to sleep longer, no, but just to get to bed, maybe read for a few minutes first, and just generally live life a bit earlier in the day!

Tschau!