Long time no post! So, I haven't yet written the posts I planned on yet, but I have done another parallel translation. This time it's an interesting little article about a physicist who's come up with a plan to introduce "anti-money" into the financial system to replace debt and interest and to bring stability to the world. Of course, it'll never happen because it (a) seems impractical and (b) would reduce the destabilising speculation that makes the very rich very much richer. So, it's doomed. Still, have a listen to the article and read along with my parallel translation where necessary. Here is the original text which I translated, along with a link to the audio:
http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/forschak/1751062
And you can find my parallel translation (i.e., like all the others, side-by-side with the original text) here:
Parallel translation of "Mit Antigeld gegen die Bankenkrise"
As always, all rights to the text and audio belong to dradio. Feel free to post any corrections to the translation in the comments!
Friday, June 8, 2012
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Sprechbude
Sorry to say, but I still haven't found the time to post my post-mortem. Hopefully I'll get more time soon!
In the meantime, I wanted to point you to a source of free audio books which I recently found:
http://www.sprechbude.de/
I guess all the material is out of copyright. There's some poetry by Heinrich Heine (of "Die Lorelei" fame) and works by Goethe and Kafka. Speaking of Kafka, how about reading and listening to "Der Prozess" to get the ball rolling:
Der Prozess (audio)
Der Prozess (text)
I haven't started on it yet, but it's quite famous and I believe it's worth a read and/or listen. Anyone who gets into it, please let us all know what you think in the comments. Personally, I still plan on reading Das Parfüm next, properly this time, including adding a lot of the new vocabulary to my Anki list. I haven't started yet because I've been reading some English language books that have been missing out on my attention due to my German studies.
In other news, everything is ticking along. We're still having a Stammtisch at work once a week, I still listen to podcasts (SWR2 Wissen podcasts are my current favourites) every day, and read articles in FAZ every few days.
Oh, and I keep up with my Anki list, of course! I'm adding words much more slowly these days, both due to a reduced necessity and reduced effort :-) Some recent additions have been words I've heard in Podcasts and which I later remembered well enough to look them up (several hours later) so this indicates an improved level of comfort with German. I still have to put in some really focused effort to bring up my listening comprehension to that 95++% region all the time. I'll let you know what I work out for that in the near future!
In the meantime, I wanted to point you to a source of free audio books which I recently found:
http://www.sprechbude.de/
I guess all the material is out of copyright. There's some poetry by Heinrich Heine (of "Die Lorelei" fame) and works by Goethe and Kafka. Speaking of Kafka, how about reading and listening to "Der Prozess" to get the ball rolling:
Der Prozess (audio)
Der Prozess (text)
I haven't started on it yet, but it's quite famous and I believe it's worth a read and/or listen. Anyone who gets into it, please let us all know what you think in the comments. Personally, I still plan on reading Das Parfüm next, properly this time, including adding a lot of the new vocabulary to my Anki list. I haven't started yet because I've been reading some English language books that have been missing out on my attention due to my German studies.
In other news, everything is ticking along. We're still having a Stammtisch at work once a week, I still listen to podcasts (SWR2 Wissen podcasts are my current favourites) every day, and read articles in FAZ every few days.
Oh, and I keep up with my Anki list, of course! I'm adding words much more slowly these days, both due to a reduced necessity and reduced effort :-) Some recent additions have been words I've heard in Podcasts and which I later remembered well enough to look them up (several hours later) so this indicates an improved level of comfort with German. I still have to put in some really focused effort to bring up my listening comprehension to that 95++% region all the time. I'll let you know what I work out for that in the near future!
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Unheilbar
Today I learnt a new German word: "unheilbar". It means "incurable", which I was given as a translation for the word "terminal" as in "terminal lung cancer". It came about during my weekly Stammtisch with my Austrian work colleague as I described the diagnosis my mother recently received from her doctor. She's never smoked, though her own mother did. Still, she left home 50 odd years ago. Shitty news.
Anyway, this partially explains why I haven't yet posted my post-mortem or future plans, along with having to prepare for the upcoming mother's day and my wife's birthday. Priorities!
I have still been listening to plenty of podcasts, and keeping up with my Anki. Lately I've realised that I really want to bring my listening level up to "perfect". I understand pretty well a lot of the time, but never 100% all the time. Well, 98-99% all the time would do me :-) I feel like my speaking has been better lately, though I would need to find more opportunities per week to improve.
At the moment though, with all that's going on, that's not going to happen. I also found out a couple of months ago that, come November, I'll be a father for the second time! Much better news! I never want to say to my kids that something was impossible for me because of having them, so I'm sure it won't stop me. It might slow me down a little though for a while once they're born, so I'd better make sure I use the time I have now!
Hopefully I'll have those other posts ready soon. Bear with me if it takes a while...
Anyway, this partially explains why I haven't yet posted my post-mortem or future plans, along with having to prepare for the upcoming mother's day and my wife's birthday. Priorities!
I have still been listening to plenty of podcasts, and keeping up with my Anki. Lately I've realised that I really want to bring my listening level up to "perfect". I understand pretty well a lot of the time, but never 100% all the time. Well, 98-99% all the time would do me :-) I feel like my speaking has been better lately, though I would need to find more opportunities per week to improve.
At the moment though, with all that's going on, that's not going to happen. I also found out a couple of months ago that, come November, I'll be a father for the second time! Much better news! I never want to say to my kids that something was impossible for me because of having them, so I'm sure it won't stop me. It might slow me down a little though for a while once they're born, so I'd better make sure I use the time I have now!
Hopefully I'll have those other posts ready soon. Bear with me if it takes a while...
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
"How Tom Recovered Time" and Khorshid Verlag books
Just a really quick post today to let everyone know about a children's book that my former German teacher (for all 8 or 9 lessons! :-) ) from Germany, who happens to be a children's book author, has just released what I believe is her first e-book. This isn't an affiliate link or anything - I'm just recommending it on the basis of her having been very helpful to me out of the goodness of her heart, which I really appreciated. I don't have any Apple devices, so I can't give a proper review. For those that do, here it is:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/
There's also an English version! That means you (or you and your children) can look at them side-by-side and use them to learn German (or English :-) ). Just a thought...
I also mentioned her website once before, but it was down then, so here it is again: Khorshid Verlag. You may find something you like there - there are kids books, etc. I don't know if you can buy direct from the website. If there's anything you want to order but can't find, either contact the author direct through the website, or let me know in the comments below and I'll ask her for you.
In the youth book section there's a book called "Der Letzte und der Erste Almani". I read a few sample pages from this a while ago and it was pretty good, though at the time my German wasn't good enough to really get into it, and I started part way through the story, so I didn't know what was going on :-)
I just wanted to make sure that I spread the word about someone who has helped me. If you do pick anything up from the website, let me know in the comments below what it was and what you thought of it!
Coming soon... "Passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2: a post-mortem" :-)
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 BESTANDEN!!!
[EDIT on 08/01/2013: To anyone planning to do the B2 exam soon, please also check out my post-mortem where I examine what went right and what went wrong]
Finally got my results yesterday, and I passed!
I emailed during the day to ask when they might be available and was told that they had got sent out last Friday and that I should get the certificate soon. The email also told me that I passed with the grade "gut".
You wouldn't believe how happy I was! Well, ok, you might. It wasn't like getting married, or seeing your child be born, but it was a pretty awesome feeling. It was like finishing a long distance race. The finish line is the actual exam, the time while you await your results is like when you're recovering your breath from that final sprint, and then when you get the results, it's like when your sense of achievement finally kicks in from the run, along with the endorphins :-)
So, without further ado, here it is (personal details deleted, of course):
(Sorry it's not a scan - I don't have one available at home)
In case you can't read the scores in the image, they were:
Leseverstehen (reading comprehension): 22/25
Hörverstehen (listening comprehension): 25/25 (Lucky! I guessed one of the answers!)
Schriftlicher Ausdruck (written expression): 19/25
Mündlicher Ausdruck (oral expression): 23/25
Total: 89/100 (one point off the top grade of "sehr gut"!)
The score is a dream come true, really. It's absolutely no lie to say that I would have been completely satisfied with a pass. Well, almost completely. I prepared really hard, but I didn't expect to do so well. The reading comprehension score is roughly what I expected from my practices, and I was quite happy to get this much considering that the first question seemed a lot more ambiguous than any of my practice ones seemed, and the section that has those silly "does the author see this as positive or negative/sceptical" questions always trips me up, even when I understand the text and the question 100%. Maybe there's some special technique I'm missing with these, but who cares now :-)
The listening comprehension was a complete shock - 100% right! Well, ok, maybe not a complete shock. It all felt good except one of the 2 point questions in the first section which I missed somehow. I was glad I had practised so much though because one thing I learnt doing the test exams was to not dwell on a missed answer. If you miss it, cut your losses. If your attention is stuck on it when the next answer is said, you'll miss more answers. I managed to avoid that.
So how did I get it right if I didn't hear the answer? Well, it's a bit crazy, but I guessed. HOW CAN THAT BE? How can you guess the answer for a fill-in-the-blanks exercise in the listening comprehension part of an exam. Well, luckily it's not context free - the question requires you to fill in some specific blanks in a timetable of events on specific dates, at different places, etc. Someone leaves a message on an answering machine, or whatever, and you have to listen to the recording and fill in the blanks with the corrections. In this case, the answer I missed was a slot where the blank was above a date. In every other place in that column, the blank above the date just had the day of the week in it. It turns out this one was no different! This meant I was able to work out the day of the week from the dates in the same column. Pretty tricky, hey?
All I can say is, never give up :-) I knew I had the wrong answer (I just wrote something random during the recording) so as I was copying my answers I had a good look at the question sheet to see if I could figure something out, and I did. Bit of a lucky break, really...
My lowest score was in the written expression, but I'm not disappointed at all. It was still a good score, after all! I think that maybe I might have got 2 to 4 of the grammatical corrections wrong (just guessing here) and so maybe my written composition got 11 to 13. No idea really, this is just pure speculation. I know I got one of the grammatical corrections in the second question wrong. Considering that I didn't really start any form of writing practice until less than 2 weeks before the exam, I should count myself lucky. NOTE: This is not enough time to practice this component! Also, I always thought I could write OK, but until you actually compose something and get a native speaker's corrections, you've got no solid foundation to base your assessment on.
The final section was probably the biggest surprise. I was worried I might not pass the exam because I felt I might not get the required 60% (15/25) on the oral exam. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. An almost perfect score in the B2 oral exam is probably the best part of all for me. The day after my exam I had a phone call from my Austrian friends with a terrible phone line, and I suddenly felt like I'd forgotten how to speak German, and I had more trouble than usual understanding them. My confidence wasn't high after the exam...
But then today I had my once a week Stammtisch at work and I felt really good. I took a minute or two to really warm up, but I felt like my understanding was better than normal and I felt confident and relaxed while speaking. I normally try to be relaxed and not worry too much, but today it just clicked better. I guess everyone has their "ups and downs" from day to day, but the results gave me a confidence boost which actually improved my speaking. It was a nice little positive feedback loop (more confidence -> better speaking -> more confidence -> etc). I know the negative feedback works just as well: lack of confidence makes you dwell on your mistakes, which are thereby amplified. It makes you hesitant, and your confidence sinks. I don't think there's a single answer to break this cycle and get into the positive feedback loop - some days things just won't feel right.
I think the most obvious answer is to start out confident, assume your mistakes don't matter and that you can do it. This isn't a new idea, but it makes sense. Your current "real" level of speaking ability at the start of any conversation will be the same, no matter what your self-assessment of your abilities on that day is. You need to accept mistakes even as you try to minimise them and don't worry about how other people perceive you. It may very well be that you're torturing your speaking partner a little (I have often felt like this in the past with my Stammtisch partner!), but you're only going to be worse if you focus on it. Be bold, and push on! I've generally been successful in applying this strategy, and it's been a real winner for me. I still stumble, I still feel silly at times, but worrying about these mistakes just doesn't help.
As the wiseman said: don't worry, be happy!
In coming posts, I hope to do a post-mortem of my learning strategies to this point, and also to talk about where to go from here. I'll need to set some more firm goals I think to keep me motivated and focused, but I also just want to enjoy the process more and more. Also, there are other languages I would like to get to at some stage, and I want to work out where these could fit in to the overall scheme. Stay tuned...
And finally, to all those still awaiting results, or who have just received them, I hope you all get the marks you know you deserve!
Bis gleich!
Finally got my results yesterday, and I passed!
I emailed during the day to ask when they might be available and was told that they had got sent out last Friday and that I should get the certificate soon. The email also told me that I passed with the grade "gut".
You wouldn't believe how happy I was! Well, ok, you might. It wasn't like getting married, or seeing your child be born, but it was a pretty awesome feeling. It was like finishing a long distance race. The finish line is the actual exam, the time while you await your results is like when you're recovering your breath from that final sprint, and then when you get the results, it's like when your sense of achievement finally kicks in from the run, along with the endorphins :-)
So, without further ado, here it is (personal details deleted, of course):
(Sorry it's not a scan - I don't have one available at home)
In case you can't read the scores in the image, they were:
Leseverstehen (reading comprehension): 22/25
Hörverstehen (listening comprehension): 25/25 (Lucky! I guessed one of the answers!)
Schriftlicher Ausdruck (written expression): 19/25
Mündlicher Ausdruck (oral expression): 23/25
Total: 89/100 (one point off the top grade of "sehr gut"!)
The score is a dream come true, really. It's absolutely no lie to say that I would have been completely satisfied with a pass. Well, almost completely. I prepared really hard, but I didn't expect to do so well. The reading comprehension score is roughly what I expected from my practices, and I was quite happy to get this much considering that the first question seemed a lot more ambiguous than any of my practice ones seemed, and the section that has those silly "does the author see this as positive or negative/sceptical" questions always trips me up, even when I understand the text and the question 100%. Maybe there's some special technique I'm missing with these, but who cares now :-)
The listening comprehension was a complete shock - 100% right! Well, ok, maybe not a complete shock. It all felt good except one of the 2 point questions in the first section which I missed somehow. I was glad I had practised so much though because one thing I learnt doing the test exams was to not dwell on a missed answer. If you miss it, cut your losses. If your attention is stuck on it when the next answer is said, you'll miss more answers. I managed to avoid that.
So how did I get it right if I didn't hear the answer? Well, it's a bit crazy, but I guessed. HOW CAN THAT BE? How can you guess the answer for a fill-in-the-blanks exercise in the listening comprehension part of an exam. Well, luckily it's not context free - the question requires you to fill in some specific blanks in a timetable of events on specific dates, at different places, etc. Someone leaves a message on an answering machine, or whatever, and you have to listen to the recording and fill in the blanks with the corrections. In this case, the answer I missed was a slot where the blank was above a date. In every other place in that column, the blank above the date just had the day of the week in it. It turns out this one was no different! This meant I was able to work out the day of the week from the dates in the same column. Pretty tricky, hey?
All I can say is, never give up :-) I knew I had the wrong answer (I just wrote something random during the recording) so as I was copying my answers I had a good look at the question sheet to see if I could figure something out, and I did. Bit of a lucky break, really...
My lowest score was in the written expression, but I'm not disappointed at all. It was still a good score, after all! I think that maybe I might have got 2 to 4 of the grammatical corrections wrong (just guessing here) and so maybe my written composition got 11 to 13. No idea really, this is just pure speculation. I know I got one of the grammatical corrections in the second question wrong. Considering that I didn't really start any form of writing practice until less than 2 weeks before the exam, I should count myself lucky. NOTE: This is not enough time to practice this component! Also, I always thought I could write OK, but until you actually compose something and get a native speaker's corrections, you've got no solid foundation to base your assessment on.
The final section was probably the biggest surprise. I was worried I might not pass the exam because I felt I might not get the required 60% (15/25) on the oral exam. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. An almost perfect score in the B2 oral exam is probably the best part of all for me. The day after my exam I had a phone call from my Austrian friends with a terrible phone line, and I suddenly felt like I'd forgotten how to speak German, and I had more trouble than usual understanding them. My confidence wasn't high after the exam...
But then today I had my once a week Stammtisch at work and I felt really good. I took a minute or two to really warm up, but I felt like my understanding was better than normal and I felt confident and relaxed while speaking. I normally try to be relaxed and not worry too much, but today it just clicked better. I guess everyone has their "ups and downs" from day to day, but the results gave me a confidence boost which actually improved my speaking. It was a nice little positive feedback loop (more confidence -> better speaking -> more confidence -> etc). I know the negative feedback works just as well: lack of confidence makes you dwell on your mistakes, which are thereby amplified. It makes you hesitant, and your confidence sinks. I don't think there's a single answer to break this cycle and get into the positive feedback loop - some days things just won't feel right.
I think the most obvious answer is to start out confident, assume your mistakes don't matter and that you can do it. This isn't a new idea, but it makes sense. Your current "real" level of speaking ability at the start of any conversation will be the same, no matter what your self-assessment of your abilities on that day is. You need to accept mistakes even as you try to minimise them and don't worry about how other people perceive you. It may very well be that you're torturing your speaking partner a little (I have often felt like this in the past with my Stammtisch partner!), but you're only going to be worse if you focus on it. Be bold, and push on! I've generally been successful in applying this strategy, and it's been a real winner for me. I still stumble, I still feel silly at times, but worrying about these mistakes just doesn't help.
As the wiseman said: don't worry, be happy!
In coming posts, I hope to do a post-mortem of my learning strategies to this point, and also to talk about where to go from here. I'll need to set some more firm goals I think to keep me motivated and focused, but I also just want to enjoy the process more and more. Also, there are other languages I would like to get to at some stage, and I want to work out where these could fit in to the overall scheme. Stay tuned...
And finally, to all those still awaiting results, or who have just received them, I hope you all get the marks you know you deserve!
Bis gleich!
Friday, April 27, 2012
Ich bin enttäuscht... Total enttäuscht!
As usual, there's a Rammstein song for every situation...
I just found out that all the language centre staff at Goethe-Institut Sydney went home at 3pm WITHOUT SENDING OUT THE RESULTS.
Can you believe it? Why must they torture me so! That means I won't know till next Monday at the earliest. I think I'll email them next week to find out when they're planning on sending the results. Not knowing is killing me.
What if I'm waiting just to find out that I failed? That would be completely shit :-) I wouldn't mind waiting if I knew I had passed!!! Oh well. I'll just have to wait I guess. I remember being surprised when they said the results should be ready by the end of next week. Now... Ich bin enttäuscht. I'm going to go listen to the song to console myself...
One funny thing this just reminded me of actually. While I was wandering around the Goethe Institute at some stage on the day (remember, this was my first time ever in the building), I came across some posters which talked about people's German learning journeys, with regards to how they interacted with the Goethe Institute in particular. I think they were meant to be success stories but, to be honest, they struck me as examples of the complete failure of their teaching method.
The first story I read seemed reasonably typical. The first "bubble" on the journey gave the date of the guy's first class with the Goethe Institute (presumably as a teenager) where he had no knowledge of German at all. The next bubble talked about how some German people he knew were surprised to hear him speaking German to them after just a few classes. Sounds promising so far. The sequence of bubbles talked about trips to Germany for work, for classes, for extended holidays, etc, etc. The final bubble showed him happily working in a German-speaking company. I think it still mentioned him doing minor courses to help him from time to time.
The astonishing thing was the timeframe - 13 years from the first bubble till the last! Now, the last was his "very comfortable" phase, so I guess we should assume he had been fluent for quite some time. But looking back on his "bubbles", he complained about having trouble understanding people and expressing himself after something like 7 or 8 years of doing Goethe courses in and out of Germany itself, and after extended holidays and work assignments in the country itself (and by extended, I mean 3 weeks to 6 months!), in German. OK, so he could easily be setting very high goals for himself, and good on him if he is... But mein Gott is that a long time to reach some kind of comfortable fluency.
Look, I have to admit a few things here. Firsly, I may have got most of the details wrong. My memory is hardly "photographic". In fact, I'd settle for it being a magic eye puzzle most of the time. BUT, I think the general thrust of the story was as I reported - from zero to cool in 13 years, with lots of courses and time in the country in-between. I don't mind the time in the country bit, but all that expensive studying would appear not to have had much of an accelerating effect.
The second thing to admit is that my German ability is somewhere about the B2 level, maybe up towards C1 in reading, but perhaps not even at the required B2 standard in speaking (only the exam results can give me any confidence in that!). That is to say, I don't know how long it will take me to reach the same sort of level as this guy achieved, and I certainly don't mean to knock what he did.
All I'm saying is, it didn't sound to me like a really ringing endorsement for the Goethe Institute courses :-)
I haven't yet been in any Goethe Courses though, so I'm not speaking from direct experience here. Chances are, unless I find some wealthy benefactor, I'm unlikely to ever attend one either. My own German studies, in brief are:
1) A useless one or two semesters in high school. I tried to study it in year 9 but they wouldn't run the class because only 3 students wanted to do it.
2) I did one twelve week absolute beginner's night course later in high school (with my mother, of all people!). It was really poorly run, and dominated by old people who read ahead and wrote in all the answers and a older female student who could speak German FLUENTLY but said she wasn't confident. The teacher would say "does everybody understand?" and this fluent speaker would say yes, so we would move on. I did learn the phrase "ich habe meine Badehosen vergessen" which could come in handy I suppose, though I've yet to use it.
3) Fast-forward almost 20 years with no German study, and basically no exposure to it (though I did study something - I went to Alliance Francaise in the meantime), and I find myself living in Germany with my wife. We are both native English speakers, and I was working in an English-speaking company. At this time I started using Assimil's "New German with Ease" which can be twee at times, but was truly brilliant for giving me the ability to understand spoken as well as written German. I could even speak a bit, even though I didn't do much.
4) During this time my company sent my wife and I to German classes after we had been there about 3 months or even more I think. Assimil had already put me way beyond this level, and I asked to go to a higher level, but I was told that the pace was pretty quick and the next level up would be too hard. And besides, my wife didn't want to go to classes alone. What did I get out of the classes then? Not a lot, to be honest. I heard a lot of butchered German, and a lot of people (in the first one or two classes at least) who just rejected the difficulty of everything immediately. Happily, these idiots left pretty quickly. It was just like being in high school again. Except, back in high school, you were stuck with the idiots for the whole year, if not the whole six years :-) The main thing I got out of the class was some good vocab and a good friend in the form of the teacher. I still write to her occasionally and she even very generously corrected something I had written to help me prepare for the exam, which was lovely of her.
5) Pretty much as documented in this blog! About 4 or 5 months after getting back to Australia, I picked up learning German again.
The total time for all the real parts of that (steps 3 to 5) is roughly 2 years so far. When will I stop? Probably never. I know that I will change focus to other languages at some stage, but as yet I'm unsure when. This may actually be the subject of a future post, so stay tuned!
As usual, if you've got comments on any of the above, feel free to leave them below - especially if you've had experience with German courses in general, and Goethe Institute ones in particular, that you would like to share...
I just found out that all the language centre staff at Goethe-Institut Sydney went home at 3pm WITHOUT SENDING OUT THE RESULTS.
Can you believe it? Why must they torture me so! That means I won't know till next Monday at the earliest. I think I'll email them next week to find out when they're planning on sending the results. Not knowing is killing me.
What if I'm waiting just to find out that I failed? That would be completely shit :-) I wouldn't mind waiting if I knew I had passed!!! Oh well. I'll just have to wait I guess. I remember being surprised when they said the results should be ready by the end of next week. Now... Ich bin enttäuscht. I'm going to go listen to the song to console myself...
One funny thing this just reminded me of actually. While I was wandering around the Goethe Institute at some stage on the day (remember, this was my first time ever in the building), I came across some posters which talked about people's German learning journeys, with regards to how they interacted with the Goethe Institute in particular. I think they were meant to be success stories but, to be honest, they struck me as examples of the complete failure of their teaching method.
The first story I read seemed reasonably typical. The first "bubble" on the journey gave the date of the guy's first class with the Goethe Institute (presumably as a teenager) where he had no knowledge of German at all. The next bubble talked about how some German people he knew were surprised to hear him speaking German to them after just a few classes. Sounds promising so far. The sequence of bubbles talked about trips to Germany for work, for classes, for extended holidays, etc, etc. The final bubble showed him happily working in a German-speaking company. I think it still mentioned him doing minor courses to help him from time to time.
The astonishing thing was the timeframe - 13 years from the first bubble till the last! Now, the last was his "very comfortable" phase, so I guess we should assume he had been fluent for quite some time. But looking back on his "bubbles", he complained about having trouble understanding people and expressing himself after something like 7 or 8 years of doing Goethe courses in and out of Germany itself, and after extended holidays and work assignments in the country itself (and by extended, I mean 3 weeks to 6 months!), in German. OK, so he could easily be setting very high goals for himself, and good on him if he is... But mein Gott is that a long time to reach some kind of comfortable fluency.
Look, I have to admit a few things here. Firsly, I may have got most of the details wrong. My memory is hardly "photographic". In fact, I'd settle for it being a magic eye puzzle most of the time. BUT, I think the general thrust of the story was as I reported - from zero to cool in 13 years, with lots of courses and time in the country in-between. I don't mind the time in the country bit, but all that expensive studying would appear not to have had much of an accelerating effect.
The second thing to admit is that my German ability is somewhere about the B2 level, maybe up towards C1 in reading, but perhaps not even at the required B2 standard in speaking (only the exam results can give me any confidence in that!). That is to say, I don't know how long it will take me to reach the same sort of level as this guy achieved, and I certainly don't mean to knock what he did.
All I'm saying is, it didn't sound to me like a really ringing endorsement for the Goethe Institute courses :-)
I haven't yet been in any Goethe Courses though, so I'm not speaking from direct experience here. Chances are, unless I find some wealthy benefactor, I'm unlikely to ever attend one either. My own German studies, in brief are:
1) A useless one or two semesters in high school. I tried to study it in year 9 but they wouldn't run the class because only 3 students wanted to do it.
2) I did one twelve week absolute beginner's night course later in high school (with my mother, of all people!). It was really poorly run, and dominated by old people who read ahead and wrote in all the answers and a older female student who could speak German FLUENTLY but said she wasn't confident. The teacher would say "does everybody understand?" and this fluent speaker would say yes, so we would move on. I did learn the phrase "ich habe meine Badehosen vergessen" which could come in handy I suppose, though I've yet to use it.
3) Fast-forward almost 20 years with no German study, and basically no exposure to it (though I did study something - I went to Alliance Francaise in the meantime), and I find myself living in Germany with my wife. We are both native English speakers, and I was working in an English-speaking company. At this time I started using Assimil's "New German with Ease" which can be twee at times, but was truly brilliant for giving me the ability to understand spoken as well as written German. I could even speak a bit, even though I didn't do much.
4) During this time my company sent my wife and I to German classes after we had been there about 3 months or even more I think. Assimil had already put me way beyond this level, and I asked to go to a higher level, but I was told that the pace was pretty quick and the next level up would be too hard. And besides, my wife didn't want to go to classes alone. What did I get out of the classes then? Not a lot, to be honest. I heard a lot of butchered German, and a lot of people (in the first one or two classes at least) who just rejected the difficulty of everything immediately. Happily, these idiots left pretty quickly. It was just like being in high school again. Except, back in high school, you were stuck with the idiots for the whole year, if not the whole six years :-) The main thing I got out of the class was some good vocab and a good friend in the form of the teacher. I still write to her occasionally and she even very generously corrected something I had written to help me prepare for the exam, which was lovely of her.
5) Pretty much as documented in this blog! About 4 or 5 months after getting back to Australia, I picked up learning German again.
The total time for all the real parts of that (steps 3 to 5) is roughly 2 years so far. When will I stop? Probably never. I know that I will change focus to other languages at some stage, but as yet I'm unsure when. This may actually be the subject of a future post, so stay tuned!
As usual, if you've got comments on any of the above, feel free to leave them below - especially if you've had experience with German courses in general, and Goethe Institute ones in particular, that you would like to share...
Saturday, April 21, 2012
My Experiences with the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 Exam at the Goethe-Institut Sydney
[EDIT on 08/01/2013: To anyone planning to do the B2 exam soon, please also check out my post-mortem where I examine what went right and what went wrong]
In this post I'll write about the actual day of my exam and how things ran. The intention is to give future test candidates some perspective about what the test setup is like, and also just to record it now while the memory is fresh, because my mind is like swiss cheese usually.
I'll start with the night before when, at about 9pm, as I finally had my first opportunity to study for the exam the next day, my daughter, who we had just put down to bed, vomited. She had been coming down with something since the night before, but this was her first vomit. It was on the floor, wall, in her bed and in her hair. So, it was off to the shower for the second time that night, and a bunch of washing had to be done too once she'd got back to bed. By about 10-10:30pm I was sitting down again, finally ready to study.
You see, it's shit like this that I think people without kids can't appreciate. Yes, we all have jobs, or other studies, and all sorts of other junk to deal with too. But then, when you've dealt with all that other crap, and you finally sit down (late) to do some final study, your kid throws up all over themself in bed. The joys of parenting!
At this stage I decided not to do too much so I could get to bed earlier, but I still didn't get to bed till just after midnight. I got to sleep alright, but at 5am I woke up from something and just couldn't get back to sleep due to thinking about the exam. Oh, and the rain was BUCKETING down. I mean in sheets as thick as lead. The weather chose to continue doing this for the rest of the day, which explains why the road outside the Goethe Institut in Sydney was flooded and they had literally had sand-bags protecting one of their entrances. Crazy!
My plan was to not use English once I entered the Goethe-Institut so as to get into the right frame of mind and stay there. This was immediately broken when, as I stepped through the door, the receptionist said "are you all here for the exams? Upstairs, please". In the waiting room upstairs I found about, I don't know 10-15 people, all waiting for the exams. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to anyone then as I had to make a trip to the bathroom - nerves will do that to you. When I came out we went to register. The people who were still standing there waiting to register were all asked what level they were doing. They were all either A1 or A2. I found out later that one girl was doing B1, and I was the only one doing B2. When I was asked what exam I was doing, despite being asked in English and despite the fact that everyone else had answered in English, I stuck to my plan and answered in German :-)
Then we returned upstairs. I had a chance to guess at everyone's ages by this stage, and I think that, although I may have been one of the oldest, there was a broad range. I would say mostly mid-20's to mid-30's, with one or two younger. I can't say I looked at everyone in detail though, but it was far from my "nightmare" mix of heaps of high school or early university students all doing the B2 exam or higher, and all being much better than me!
After a short while all the people for the A1 and A2 exams were taken off to separate rooms for their introductions to the exam conditions, etc. There were three of us left in the waiting room - me, the young woman doing the B1 exam, and another woman who had come in with one of the men doing the A1 exam. Whenever anyone coming through asked us if we were here for the exams, this woman was at pains to point out that she was just here as moral support with her boyfriend and that she was a native speaker. What luck for me! We started chatting in German and had a good 5 minutes to talk about why her boyfriend was there (they were planning on emigrating to Germany, so he needed to have some language skills to show for the immigration application process, and I guess even A1 is enough to count as something, as basic as it is). During our chat the young woman doing the B1 exam asked this German speaker something, which the native speaker didn't understand. I'm pretty sure I remember understanding it, or just not hearing it properly because she spoke too quietly. The German woman had to ask her to repeat it several times. I don't think it was wrong, or her accent was bad (it sounded good to me in this short sample), she just lacked the confidence to project her voice adequately when speaking German. I felt really bad for her, because I felt like that could really knock her confidence before the exam. Looking back, I wish I had told her to come sit with us so she could chat too. I hate thinking that this might have shaken her a little. I know I would have felt bad if the German speaker had kept asking me to repeat.
Luckily for me, since I was sitting next to her, she could understand me perfectly. I told her the spoken part was the bit I was most worried about because I left practising it till too late, but she very reassuringly told me that I'll do very well because my German was very good. What better compliment could you receive right before a German exam! A great confidence boost!
We were then called down to do our exams in separate rooms. I had a whole classroom to myself, which was both relaxing and weird at the same time :-) The order of exam components was all completely different to what I expected. I was given the written components in the following order:
1) Hörverstehen (Listening comprehension)
2) Schriftlicher Ausdruck (Written expression)
3) Leseverstehen (reading comprehension)
I expected the order to be 3, 1, 2, but it didn't matter too much, though I might have preferred not to do the listening section first!
I found out later that the exam organiser was locking me in to the room, and it could only be opened from the outside. Woah! Fire risk! Sure, it's cheaper and easier for them to run, but if someone burns to death some day during an exam, there'll be hell to pay...
So, Hörverstehen. I think it went OK. It's in two sections - the first part you hear only once, and you need to fill in the correct details in a table of information - surely some sort of itinerary. These 5 questions are worth 2 marks each, so I was very disappointed that I missed one of them. I knew I had the answer wrong so when I copied it over to the answer book, I just had a guess, but that was almost certainly 2 points gone, without allowing for other mistakes. Oh well. The second part is 10 questions worth 1.5 each. I think this part went better and less ambiguously than many of my practice runs had gone, so I think it was OK. My usual score for this part is about 7/10 = 10.5/15 points. I hope I got enough in the first section to bring this over the 15/25 required.
Just a sidenote, it's not strictly necessary to get 15 out of 25 in every section. You need 45/75 for the written parts, and 15 out of 25 for the spoken part (at least, of course!) to pass. However, I made it my goal to not let any area be weak enough that I needed to hope for cross-subsidisation between them.
The Schriftlicher Ausdruck section went OK I think. There's a written composition part, and correcting errors in a letter. I think the second one I got at least 6 in. I would have said 7, but I made a silly change as I was copying my answers to the answer sheet that's given me doubts. However, I've just looked it up and even the answer I thought was right is wrong, so I can stop worrying about it. I definitely got it wrong! :-) Damn... I knew there was something else in that sentence which I wasn't sure about, but I was so sure of this one that I ignored the other thing. Oh well, can't change it now.
In the free composition, I did this differently to how I practised it. In practice, I had written a rough version and then copied that over as a final version. VERY, VERY TIME-CONSUMING! I noticed that I wasn't making many corrections during this time, so in the exam I made brief notes of sentence fragments and words for each point and then just tried to compose it once and write it neatly. Any bad mistakes I just crossed through and wrote again. This gave me time at the end to re-read it at least once, which is good. It seemed mostly basic in its sentence structure (I deliberately tried to keep it that way to avoid tricking myself with over-complicated sentences) but it covered everything and had a decent flow. You are required to write at least 180 words - I think mine was at least 300! One thing I should have done at the end is to focus on grammatical errors of mismatches in the endings on the articles (words like "ein", "der") and related words ("mein", "dein", etc) and adjectives. I know what these should be, but often get them wrong in writing when I'm rushing (and VERY often when I'm speaking! This might be my next goal to fix up!).
Finally came the Leseverstehen. The first question in it was a bit awkward - it seemed very broad and ambiguous. Usually I scream through this in practice questions and get it close to 100% right, but this time I'm not so sure. It also took me more than the suggested 15 minutes, but I easily made up this loss on all the other sections (I can read quite fast now when the texts are at B2 level). The other question I had issues with is one that always gets me - the one where you have to say whether the author sees something as positive, or negative/sceptical (or ambiguous, really). So, you have a 50/50 shot. Should be easy! Except that even when I understand the text 100%, and the question 100%, I often find myself strongly disagreeing with the answer. They seem to expect you to find just the first sentence that relates to the question and form your opinion off that, but not always. And therein lies the rub. So, yeah, I think this question annoying. I could easily have got a couple wrong because the possible answer could go either way.
Overall, however, the reading section went OK and I was reasonably happy with it.
I think that all the written parts were OK. I'm reasonably confident that I could pass this part.
After a short 5 minute break, I started my preparation for the spoken part. It went quite well. As I was on my own, I didn't get a choice about the topic, but the topic I got was OK. I used some of the thoughts I had put together for some written practice prior to the exam, because the topics all overlap quite a lot to be honest. One thing that went wrong here is that I didn't make any notes for the dialogue question. (I just spent too much time on the monologue preparation, and didn't get into the right frame of mind for the dialogue. This may prove to have been a big mistake.
At the appointed time one of the oral examiners came to collect me. I went into one of the front offices, which was nicely lit and a pleasant change of venue from the dark, cold classroom where I had done the other parts. I was introduced to my two examiners, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I began my monologue. My memory of it now is that it went OK. Probably about as good, or slightly better, than some of my better practice runs. It was actually much easier to deliver it to an audience than when I practised it by speaking into my mobile phone and listening back later. A real audience, on the contrary from being scary, actually helped with important visual cues of their attention, as well as the occasional brief word of agreement, or acknowledgement of what was said, which helped a lot with the flow I felt.
The second part, the dialogue, was done with one of the examiners because I was the only B2 candidate. He was very nice and friendly, and put me at ease. However, I hadn't prepared for this section, and I didn't have a lot to say about each thing - I should have at least looked over the photos in advance and had a think. Also, I committed the cardinal sin of letting him direct the conversation. I don't think I ever explicitly elicited his feedback, except with the occasional "oder?" or something similar. I was interactive, but more responsive than proactive. I'm really annoyed at myself because I knew one of the marking criteria where I could get points without necessarily knowing more German was by being very interactive, and I don't think I did enough of this to overcome some of my weaknesses where I would score lower. I had no trouble understanding the examiner, and he didn't have any understanding me (at least, none that he showed), but I'm just not sure how this part would pan out for me.
These two parts are worth equal marks overall, so only time will tell now. However, I do already know that spending ALL of my preparation time on the monologue was misguided. I got about 15 minutes to prepare (actually a little less), of which I would suggest to anyone else doing this exam that they spend 3-5 minutes on preparing for the dialogue. I had also prepared a small list of phrases specifically to help with the dialogue, eliciting feedback, etc. I hardly used any of these. It didn't help that I only compiled the list on the night before the exam, and with my limited time available, I didn't really practise them enough to make them flow out of me. I had also, obviously, never practised the dialogue section. I considered asking my Austrian friend at work to help me do that on the day before the exam, but as luck would have it she was off sick that day. All my own fault, of course, for leaving the specific spoken practice so late.
My honest final assessment is that I felt that, although I'm not guaranteed to pass, which is really where I wanted to be before the exam, I should at least come very close. It was definitely the right exam for me to take - B1 would have been too easy, and, although I think I could do OK on a C1 exam, OK in this context would most likely be a fail, especially in the spoken section. So, yeah, whatever the result, I now think of myself as being at B2 level. Still, it would be really, really nice if Goethe agreed. Then I could proudly write the name of my certificate on my resume!
PHEW! Sorry, that was a big post. If you made it this far, your reward is to know that I'll write a post sometime in the near future assessing my studies to this date - what went right, what went wrong, ideas for how to improve in the future, etc.
Danke fürs Lesen!
In this post I'll write about the actual day of my exam and how things ran. The intention is to give future test candidates some perspective about what the test setup is like, and also just to record it now while the memory is fresh, because my mind is like swiss cheese usually.
I'll start with the night before when, at about 9pm, as I finally had my first opportunity to study for the exam the next day, my daughter, who we had just put down to bed, vomited. She had been coming down with something since the night before, but this was her first vomit. It was on the floor, wall, in her bed and in her hair. So, it was off to the shower for the second time that night, and a bunch of washing had to be done too once she'd got back to bed. By about 10-10:30pm I was sitting down again, finally ready to study.
You see, it's shit like this that I think people without kids can't appreciate. Yes, we all have jobs, or other studies, and all sorts of other junk to deal with too. But then, when you've dealt with all that other crap, and you finally sit down (late) to do some final study, your kid throws up all over themself in bed. The joys of parenting!
At this stage I decided not to do too much so I could get to bed earlier, but I still didn't get to bed till just after midnight. I got to sleep alright, but at 5am I woke up from something and just couldn't get back to sleep due to thinking about the exam. Oh, and the rain was BUCKETING down. I mean in sheets as thick as lead. The weather chose to continue doing this for the rest of the day, which explains why the road outside the Goethe Institut in Sydney was flooded and they had literally had sand-bags protecting one of their entrances. Crazy!
My plan was to not use English once I entered the Goethe-Institut so as to get into the right frame of mind and stay there. This was immediately broken when, as I stepped through the door, the receptionist said "are you all here for the exams? Upstairs, please". In the waiting room upstairs I found about, I don't know 10-15 people, all waiting for the exams. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to anyone then as I had to make a trip to the bathroom - nerves will do that to you. When I came out we went to register. The people who were still standing there waiting to register were all asked what level they were doing. They were all either A1 or A2. I found out later that one girl was doing B1, and I was the only one doing B2. When I was asked what exam I was doing, despite being asked in English and despite the fact that everyone else had answered in English, I stuck to my plan and answered in German :-)
Then we returned upstairs. I had a chance to guess at everyone's ages by this stage, and I think that, although I may have been one of the oldest, there was a broad range. I would say mostly mid-20's to mid-30's, with one or two younger. I can't say I looked at everyone in detail though, but it was far from my "nightmare" mix of heaps of high school or early university students all doing the B2 exam or higher, and all being much better than me!
After a short while all the people for the A1 and A2 exams were taken off to separate rooms for their introductions to the exam conditions, etc. There were three of us left in the waiting room - me, the young woman doing the B1 exam, and another woman who had come in with one of the men doing the A1 exam. Whenever anyone coming through asked us if we were here for the exams, this woman was at pains to point out that she was just here as moral support with her boyfriend and that she was a native speaker. What luck for me! We started chatting in German and had a good 5 minutes to talk about why her boyfriend was there (they were planning on emigrating to Germany, so he needed to have some language skills to show for the immigration application process, and I guess even A1 is enough to count as something, as basic as it is). During our chat the young woman doing the B1 exam asked this German speaker something, which the native speaker didn't understand. I'm pretty sure I remember understanding it, or just not hearing it properly because she spoke too quietly. The German woman had to ask her to repeat it several times. I don't think it was wrong, or her accent was bad (it sounded good to me in this short sample), she just lacked the confidence to project her voice adequately when speaking German. I felt really bad for her, because I felt like that could really knock her confidence before the exam. Looking back, I wish I had told her to come sit with us so she could chat too. I hate thinking that this might have shaken her a little. I know I would have felt bad if the German speaker had kept asking me to repeat.
Luckily for me, since I was sitting next to her, she could understand me perfectly. I told her the spoken part was the bit I was most worried about because I left practising it till too late, but she very reassuringly told me that I'll do very well because my German was very good. What better compliment could you receive right before a German exam! A great confidence boost!
We were then called down to do our exams in separate rooms. I had a whole classroom to myself, which was both relaxing and weird at the same time :-) The order of exam components was all completely different to what I expected. I was given the written components in the following order:
1) Hörverstehen (Listening comprehension)
2) Schriftlicher Ausdruck (Written expression)
3) Leseverstehen (reading comprehension)
I expected the order to be 3, 1, 2, but it didn't matter too much, though I might have preferred not to do the listening section first!
I found out later that the exam organiser was locking me in to the room, and it could only be opened from the outside. Woah! Fire risk! Sure, it's cheaper and easier for them to run, but if someone burns to death some day during an exam, there'll be hell to pay...
So, Hörverstehen. I think it went OK. It's in two sections - the first part you hear only once, and you need to fill in the correct details in a table of information - surely some sort of itinerary. These 5 questions are worth 2 marks each, so I was very disappointed that I missed one of them. I knew I had the answer wrong so when I copied it over to the answer book, I just had a guess, but that was almost certainly 2 points gone, without allowing for other mistakes. Oh well. The second part is 10 questions worth 1.5 each. I think this part went better and less ambiguously than many of my practice runs had gone, so I think it was OK. My usual score for this part is about 7/10 = 10.5/15 points. I hope I got enough in the first section to bring this over the 15/25 required.
Just a sidenote, it's not strictly necessary to get 15 out of 25 in every section. You need 45/75 for the written parts, and 15 out of 25 for the spoken part (at least, of course!) to pass. However, I made it my goal to not let any area be weak enough that I needed to hope for cross-subsidisation between them.
The Schriftlicher Ausdruck section went OK I think. There's a written composition part, and correcting errors in a letter. I think the second one I got at least 6 in. I would have said 7, but I made a silly change as I was copying my answers to the answer sheet that's given me doubts. However, I've just looked it up and even the answer I thought was right is wrong, so I can stop worrying about it. I definitely got it wrong! :-) Damn... I knew there was something else in that sentence which I wasn't sure about, but I was so sure of this one that I ignored the other thing. Oh well, can't change it now.
In the free composition, I did this differently to how I practised it. In practice, I had written a rough version and then copied that over as a final version. VERY, VERY TIME-CONSUMING! I noticed that I wasn't making many corrections during this time, so in the exam I made brief notes of sentence fragments and words for each point and then just tried to compose it once and write it neatly. Any bad mistakes I just crossed through and wrote again. This gave me time at the end to re-read it at least once, which is good. It seemed mostly basic in its sentence structure (I deliberately tried to keep it that way to avoid tricking myself with over-complicated sentences) but it covered everything and had a decent flow. You are required to write at least 180 words - I think mine was at least 300! One thing I should have done at the end is to focus on grammatical errors of mismatches in the endings on the articles (words like "ein", "der") and related words ("mein", "dein", etc) and adjectives. I know what these should be, but often get them wrong in writing when I'm rushing (and VERY often when I'm speaking! This might be my next goal to fix up!).
Finally came the Leseverstehen. The first question in it was a bit awkward - it seemed very broad and ambiguous. Usually I scream through this in practice questions and get it close to 100% right, but this time I'm not so sure. It also took me more than the suggested 15 minutes, but I easily made up this loss on all the other sections (I can read quite fast now when the texts are at B2 level). The other question I had issues with is one that always gets me - the one where you have to say whether the author sees something as positive, or negative/sceptical (or ambiguous, really). So, you have a 50/50 shot. Should be easy! Except that even when I understand the text 100%, and the question 100%, I often find myself strongly disagreeing with the answer. They seem to expect you to find just the first sentence that relates to the question and form your opinion off that, but not always. And therein lies the rub. So, yeah, I think this question annoying. I could easily have got a couple wrong because the possible answer could go either way.
Overall, however, the reading section went OK and I was reasonably happy with it.
I think that all the written parts were OK. I'm reasonably confident that I could pass this part.
After a short 5 minute break, I started my preparation for the spoken part. It went quite well. As I was on my own, I didn't get a choice about the topic, but the topic I got was OK. I used some of the thoughts I had put together for some written practice prior to the exam, because the topics all overlap quite a lot to be honest. One thing that went wrong here is that I didn't make any notes for the dialogue question. (I just spent too much time on the monologue preparation, and didn't get into the right frame of mind for the dialogue. This may prove to have been a big mistake.
At the appointed time one of the oral examiners came to collect me. I went into one of the front offices, which was nicely lit and a pleasant change of venue from the dark, cold classroom where I had done the other parts. I was introduced to my two examiners, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I began my monologue. My memory of it now is that it went OK. Probably about as good, or slightly better, than some of my better practice runs. It was actually much easier to deliver it to an audience than when I practised it by speaking into my mobile phone and listening back later. A real audience, on the contrary from being scary, actually helped with important visual cues of their attention, as well as the occasional brief word of agreement, or acknowledgement of what was said, which helped a lot with the flow I felt.
The second part, the dialogue, was done with one of the examiners because I was the only B2 candidate. He was very nice and friendly, and put me at ease. However, I hadn't prepared for this section, and I didn't have a lot to say about each thing - I should have at least looked over the photos in advance and had a think. Also, I committed the cardinal sin of letting him direct the conversation. I don't think I ever explicitly elicited his feedback, except with the occasional "oder?" or something similar. I was interactive, but more responsive than proactive. I'm really annoyed at myself because I knew one of the marking criteria where I could get points without necessarily knowing more German was by being very interactive, and I don't think I did enough of this to overcome some of my weaknesses where I would score lower. I had no trouble understanding the examiner, and he didn't have any understanding me (at least, none that he showed), but I'm just not sure how this part would pan out for me.
These two parts are worth equal marks overall, so only time will tell now. However, I do already know that spending ALL of my preparation time on the monologue was misguided. I got about 15 minutes to prepare (actually a little less), of which I would suggest to anyone else doing this exam that they spend 3-5 minutes on preparing for the dialogue. I had also prepared a small list of phrases specifically to help with the dialogue, eliciting feedback, etc. I hardly used any of these. It didn't help that I only compiled the list on the night before the exam, and with my limited time available, I didn't really practise them enough to make them flow out of me. I had also, obviously, never practised the dialogue section. I considered asking my Austrian friend at work to help me do that on the day before the exam, but as luck would have it she was off sick that day. All my own fault, of course, for leaving the specific spoken practice so late.
My honest final assessment is that I felt that, although I'm not guaranteed to pass, which is really where I wanted to be before the exam, I should at least come very close. It was definitely the right exam for me to take - B1 would have been too easy, and, although I think I could do OK on a C1 exam, OK in this context would most likely be a fail, especially in the spoken section. So, yeah, whatever the result, I now think of myself as being at B2 level. Still, it would be really, really nice if Goethe agreed. Then I could proudly write the name of my certificate on my resume!
PHEW! Sorry, that was a big post. If you made it this far, your reward is to know that I'll write a post sometime in the near future assessing my studies to this date - what went right, what went wrong, ideas for how to improve in the future, etc.
Danke fürs Lesen!
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