The beginning of September started well – I wanted to make a routine of having a lesson every day. For me, the mornings are best, where I’m wide awake, have been fed and watered, and it’s a quieter time of day where I can focus on just this one thing. Duolingo states that 5 minutes a day is all you need but I wanted to put aside 10-20 – a bit of recap of what I did the day before, a new lesson and then a story…
After two weeks, this routine was going well.
Progressing slowly but persevering and whilst I had questions, I would write them down and carry on. I had an additional bonus of chatting with Cathy at our monthly work meeting, who is one of Dialogue’s Directors as well as a qualified English and German tutor – giving her updates as to how I was getting on and asking her some of the WHY questions that I had. In 10 minutes, she had explained to me the WHYs and it made so much more sense! In just 10 minutes! I need me a Cathy, and so she has kindly agreed to teach me a few lessons to help me become confident and fluent in what I know so far, as well as guiding me on how to approach the new topics I want to teach myself.
Cathy - Translation Director at Dialogue/ Qualified English and German Tutor
I also watched a programme on Netflix called The Defeated – which contained English, Russian and German speaking actors (yes it was about the war) – with English subtitles. I challenged myself to see how much of what was being spoken I could pick up and understand without looking at the subtitles. Turns out, very little. When you’re learning, everything is given to you so slowly – and so it’s incredibly hard to listen to speech at a normal pace and pick out all the words in time.
It wasn’t all bad though, I was able to pick out a few pieces, such as “Es tut mir leid” (I’m sorry) / “Zwei Minuten später” (two minutes later) and “es regnet” (It’s raining). Better than nothing!
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