Five months later

I remember being a little frustrated with my German over the summer. I had to write a bunch of emails and correspond with different people about a bunch of logistical things, and it would always take me a minimum of 30 minutes to pound out even the most basic email. It's pretty tiring to agonize at a keyboard, mulling over a sentence and trying to find ways to fully express your thoughts even in the most basic ways. At one point during a particularly toilsome email writing session I thought, "You know what? When I can whip out emails in German like I can in English, I'm gonna know that I've made a lot of progress."

It's always funny remembering those little thoughts down the line when the things you were thinking about or hoping for finally end up happening. I had a particularly lucid email session this evening, which triggered the memory of how hard it was for me to write over the summer. There's something to be said for knowing the grammar and the vocabulary of a language, but when you finally get to a level where you can express yourself with reasonable comfort, speed, and fluidity, that's something else entirely. It wasn't necessarily the longest email, or the most complicated, and I guarantee there's a fair number of mistakes (there are too many things to mess up in a language like German), but I was pretty proud of how easy it was anyway.

Ich heisse Andy, und ich bin amerikanische Fremdsprachenassistent bei der Gesamtschule Eidelstedt. Ich habe Lust, teil an deinem Literaturkurs zu nehmen, aber ich habe leider die Anmeldung verpasst (es war letzte Freitag, oder?). Ist es noch möglich für mich, teil am Kurs zu nehmen? Als ich in der Uni war habe ich Englische Literatur studiert, und in jedem Fall interessiere ich mich für viele Sorten von Literatur. Ich glaube, dass dieser Kurs mein Deutsch viel verbessern würde.