Ich spreche gut die Deutsche! Or so I like to pretend...

[listersgirl]

Guten tag! Wie geht's?

I'm taking a German course with sarcasma right now, and dude, it's pretty pathetic. Correction: I'm pretty pathetic. I did two years of German in university, so you'd think I would have retained some of it, but then you'd be thinking crazy thoughts.

Languages and I are a strange combination. I love languages, and I love learning languages. Beginner language classes are so much fun - those first steps to being able to say anything, the introduction of new letters in the alphabet, the continual annoyance of trying to remember that a certain letter is pronounced like *this* in German, and like *this* in Russian. I'm very good at grammar, too, so it's easy to make sense of a new language very quickly.

My problem is always that I have a terrible memory for vocabulary. I can remember how to say something, I just don't have the words to say it. Likewise I have generally an excellent accent and good pronunciation, I just don't have any actual words. Makes for a difficult conversation, no? Plus it means that however brilliant I look at picking up languages at the beginning, I always come to a screeching halt right about the time everyone else is starting to make sense of things. And I've never hit actual fluency in anything.

So, refresher course. It's an intermediate level course, which is probably appropriate, although it would have been more useful if I had refreshed myself before the refresher. And it's fun, mostly because it's held in a high school classroom, and I think sitting in a desk automatically regresses me until I'm about 14 years old. So I'm giddy and silly all the way through the class. And hopefully this time some of it will sink in, and I'll come away with more knowledge than how to say 'crocodile'*

Auf Wiedersehen!

*Krokodil, if you were wondering