didilysims said: Argh, verb in second position! I should KNOW that! It’s only been a few months since I stopped taking German and already I’m forgetting so much. 😦 Thank you for correcting me, though. Can’t improve without corrections! 🙂
Ah, don’t worry! Your German is…
Wow, that’s sad! I actually learned English first by actually using it- in songs, short stories etc in Grade 3-4. it’s very playful and great fun. Years 5-8 is more about grammar (where I really sucked… almost failed it once). And after Year 8 it’s again mostly improving. I might have been lucky because after Year 7 all my teachers were really focussed on speaking. (In retrospective, I think I just didn’t care about grammar :D) Being abroad might’ve helped, too.
English is our main second language- actually, all I can do in Latin is insult someone as a donkey and impress my youth group kids by translating old church inscriptons. ^^ And we had the option to choose between Latin and French in Year 6, which makes a max. of 7 years to learn the language. And I’ve heared most of the ones to choose French (well, the one who chose it in Year 10- 2 years of French) can’t really speak it either. The most common phrases known are (no way I can get the punctuation right): “Je suis desole!” and “Sacre bleu, un piscon!” Don’t ask me about the last part, I think it was a running gag. So it’s very common for german kids to be able to fluently speak English, but depending on teacher and school, be unable to really communicate in any other language…
Oh, Latin is great for getting a basic understanding of grammar and all this stuff (I heard ;)). I can sometimes make out English words or the basic meaning of some words in a language I don’t speak by knowing it. (By the way, Latin was very theoretical. Vocabulary and grammar exercises and translating texts word-by-.word were the main content of our classes. It was sad, because even if I don’t really like the language (maybe because it was such a theoretical process of deciphering- and there’s no way you could call our chores there-), Latin is such a great language for getting a basic understanding of our “modern” languages and is a surprisingly complex language- more complex than German, if you compare what we learned about grammar in German vs. what we learned about grammar in Latin- even with the native speaker bonus.
German music and books? *stares at bookcase and ITunes library blankly*
aondaneedles 