Pumpkin Spice-Vapor Renu

[juliery]

I'm better at reading it than anything, next comes writing, and finally, actually speaking it. But in all three, my vocabulary is too limited to hold many practical conversations. I can ask simple things like what is your name, how old are you, where are you from... stuff like that, and I can understand quite a bit, even if I don't know every word. I'm also bad at recalling the correct word when I want to speak it. I guess that's what happens after 6 years and nobody else who speaks it around you.

I am best at speaking it, although through childhood and spending entire summers there, most of my conversations were with other kids my age, cousins, friends, etc. So obviously the vocabulary of a child and teen is somewhat different than an adult. But usually, say I can't recall the name of a disease, I could describe it, or symptoms well enough using the vocabulary I do possess that then the person will know what I mean and I slap myself in the head and say "ach, ja"!! I can speak it well enough that I can hold conversations with most anyone, normal social type conversations that is. I DO screw up the der, die, das and the forms of them, and words like dieses, diesem, etc. but most people are pretty forgiving of that and of course they still know what you mean anyway. I talk to my cousins on the phone as well as a few friends and also I insist on them WRITING to me in German, because even if I can't write back a big long thing in German, I still keep the language in my head and expand my vocabulary by seeing the words. I can speak it conversationally, I can read almost anything, except for like say technical type text or like something with terms that would be associated with a field of knowledge I don't possess. But like an email from people I know or novel type book, no problem. Writing is what I do least well.....it is strange, like speaking I keep the words in the correct order, but somehow when I write, sometimes it just doesn't LOOK right, even when it is.

My mom also has a friend who lives about an hour from here....they are both from Bremerhaven, went to school together and I am in regular contact with her, and her husband who is also German. My first husband's father is also from Germany, southern part and he LOVED that I could speak German because his wife can't and none of their 5 kids can speak as well as I can. In fact, I just saw him a couple months ago and we spoke in German, and you can tell how much he loves that, funny. I guess it just reminds them of "home" even if just for a few minutes.

[DerStadtschutz]

I think the reason you're better at speaking it is because you were actually there around people who speak it, so you've heard and spoken the words a lot more, where I learned it in school, where there is much more reading and writing than actual speaking. That, and beyond some simple recognition exercises with flashcards, and the occasional little skits we had to write and "perform," we didn't really say the words. Your experience/knowledge is much more practical, and also vast.