One comforting thought, the Defense Language Institute classifies German as a Category II language for how hard it is for an English speaker to learn. The common Spanish and French fitting into Category I, Russian, Greek, and Hewbrew into Category III, and the mind boggling Chinese and Japanese into the topper, are Category IV languages.


That makes me feel a bit better... lol.


I've heard that a lot of people never reach native fluency in a language, I doubt I'll ever do so either but I would settle for knowing as much as an elementary school student. I'm generally able to read German well enough as long as I've got access to a dictionary but not so good at composition.


I'd like to fit some time for study into each day, even if it's not a great amount of time.. It's better then nothing. I've been looking at adding reading to my daily routine, don't know how well it will go. I figure, the more I read the more chance I should hopefully have of getting a 'feel' for it.


When I was learning to read English, I rmemeber I had to write out every word I couldn't read, 3 times plus a sentence out of it. Needless to say, I didn't like that part of school ^_^. It's a good idea though but I'm not about to try likewise in German, while I arguably care more about getting spelling and grammar right in German then in English. If I did some thing like that, my hand writing would get even *worse*.


As it stands, writing English by hand (the conventional pen/pencil on paper method) is an atrocious combination of printing letters and cursive letters. Plus because not only am I accustomed to writing as fast as I can think, which results in many 'lazy pauses' as my mind backtracks to where my hand left off. My way of writing tends to reflect my minds way of thinking, speaking habbits, and preferences on 'style' much more so then the formal 'laws of English' allow -- I'm a person, not a cyborgnetic English Teacher ^_^


I could just imagine... 20 or 30 laters, writing in Gerglish? (What ever you want to call a mixture of German and English words, writing, and pronunciations) To top it all off, haha that would put the final nail in my hand writings coffin.