[flag=]de[/flag] Whenever I am in Germany, I feel like Ildefonso (the man without words). I cannot understand what people say. That is a reasonable fact, since I do not know German, but I feel so awkward when I buy something, and have no idea what the cashier means. Does she want a cent, or offer a bag, or that I put the sign "closed" on the band after my items, or something else? (All these have happened.)
What then is the problem? I have a vague understanding of written German, so I can read a novel in German and get the gist of it, but I know very few words, and very little grammar, so just reading semi-understood text really achieves nothing in expanding my knowledge of the language. I have nothing to build upon.
I need to learn the basics from the start. I have several beginners coursebooks and some grammar books, and lots of dictionaries and novels, so availability to the material is not the problem. Using the material is.
Now, I will return to Germany in July, and I would like to have learnt something more before then, so I start this thread to note down what I have done, to force myself forward. Hopefully I will have worked my way through one of the books, and perhaps picked up something. Anything would be an achievement for me. Currently I only grasp "Es tut mir leid", which is heard in every episode of every Krimi-show on German TV, so it is frequent at least, but it does not get me very far, communicationwise.
I have most of the pronunciation, but with a foreign accent, although not a Swedish accent strangely, and I have been told not to use Austrian painters as models for speech. German sounds much softer, it is said. Hm.