Ich lerne Deutsch

Three weeks down in the German course and I am still not fluent.  Maybe I expect too much.

Not really.  The time has raced by and I do think that I am starting to pick things up.  However I am being hampered by a career spent training my brain to deal with countless safety inductions.  I am now such a finely tuned safety induction machine that I can sit through a 3 hour company safety induction and immediately regurgitate all the salient points there of, in an assessment of understanding. (You can't call them tests or examinations as these words infer that there is some significance to comprehending the safety induction, there by placing the individual under pressure to perform.  Pressure leads to stress, stress leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side.)  30 seconds after completing the aforementioned assessment I would have trouble recalling whether the life boats are situated under the flare or adjacent to the PLQ or if you really are allowed to smoke cigars in the well bay area.  Whilst this skill has allowed me to attend numerous safety inductions successfully, admittedly with the downside of becoming a danger to myself and my colleagues, it is now becoming a liability to me learning German.  My problem is that I can quite successfully read something or listen to something and then regurgitate it but I do so without real comprehension.  So up until now I have appeared to be quite clever, gaining a gold star in verb conjugation and an elephant stamp in definite article association.

Unfortunately the party is now over.  In today's lesson the teacher insisted that we start bringing together all of the stuff that we had learnt so far, with the aim of creating original sentences.  This is where it became apparent that my two closest competitors in the race to learn German, make no mistake it is a race, were a fair bit more advanced than myself.  What is worse one of them is American.  She actually told me she had trouble understanding me once and I wasn't quick enough to reply that it was probably because I was speaking English.  I always come up with a witty quip 2 years after the event.  Today I wrote my first letter in German.  We were given a number of subjects/items that we had to include but the rest was up to us.  Some of the things I remember are, Potato Museum (don't laugh it exists), the Minibar being empty, playing foot ball at 7pm, the TV not working and the hotel room being small.  I addressed the letter to Annika and am particularly proud of the fact that I managed to say that Paul "the Finger" Dalton came over to visit, so of course, the minibar is now empty.