nichts verstehen

I don't actually comprehend any German outside my course tapes. I watched to some Deutsche Welle video clips about various German topics, and naturally I couldn't grab more than a word here and there. Then I opened the slow news reports that have audio and accompanying text. Dozens of words that I haven't learned show up, so comprehension at any speed is a lost cause. Now here's a newsflash: I'm going to Germany in ten days. I hadn't thought to announce that here since nobody reads the blog, but it's worth noting for my own recollection when I read this over in the future. It would certainly be pleasing at this point to understand a bit of German news reporting, news reports being the easiest thing to understand on TV (there's a lot of context.) I'll have to accept that I will land in Germany with a decent vocabulary and ability to get a sentence out, but I won't be able to understand anything said to me. But that's simply the way I learn. Other people pick up the comprehension quick. I learn the grammar and a couple thousand vocabulary words.

The only real mystery is whether my ten days in Germany will do anything for my speaking and comprehension abilities. I think it will help substantially, but I also expect 95% of my conversations to be in English. My travel partner and I will practice a fair amount of German, and our hosts will likely humor me a bit with it, but I'm not going to run into anyone who doesn't speak English. That's an impossible dream in Germany.

I expect to complete my FSI lessons in the next two months. I've stepped up the sentence writing a bit but I haven't invested at all in comprehension. It's time to work on it. I have my Wise Guy a cappella CDs and many of the songs seem to have German lyrics online. A combination of music listening and the slow transcribed Deutche Welle news recordings should be a good start.

One last note. I finally learned the conditional tense in German, which seems to have no distinction from the subjunctive at the moment. The conditional is the last major component of the grammar for me to learn, I think. It has already made a big difference in terms of my speaking ability. Next time you speak English, notice how often you use the conditional. It's more imperative than conditional, heh, heh.