Learning German
Hello, all!
I'm 21 years old and a native speaker of English. I'm looking to improve my German. I've never had trouble understanding it (except for my limited vocabulary), but speaking it tends to be difficult for me.
My mother is a German immigrant, and the story in my house goes that in the process of attempting to teach me German as a very young child, I got to the point where I could no longer understand my English-speaking father, who was away at work most of the day. So my mother stopped speaking German to me for several years. Since then she attempted to teach me German, or to force me to read it to her, intermittently for many years.
I took German language classes in elementary school and high school for seven years and I didn't feel that I got very much out of it besides a small increase in my vocabulary. I always got A's but I still had a horrible time with grammar. I feel as though I learned a large portion of German grammar "instinctively" during the initial phase (as a toddler, via immersion), and because of that I have a very, very difficult time learning grammar in the more rigid, structured way it was taught to me in school.
My one attempt at taking a German class in college- a class taught in all German- was more helpful, but not as helpful as I thought an immersion-type class would have been for me. I felt that English being so off-limits hindered me, rather than helped me, because I went out of my way to use simple sentences that I knew were correct rather than ask the correct way to say what I really meant. I've visited Germany many, many times since I was a child. This past winter when we visited, I was rather startled to see that I was thinking in German. It was much easier for me to help guide my mother back to the airport, for instance, in German than it was to say it in English. I was also able to hold conversations with my family, which I hadn't been able to do before. I don't know where any of this came from. Granted, I hadn't been there in six years, but still. Something similar had happened to me two years previous in Costa Rica with my extremely limited Spanish.
I'm 21 years old and a native speaker of English. I'm looking to improve my German. I've never had trouble understanding it (except for my limited vocabulary), but speaking it tends to be difficult for me.
My mother is a German immigrant, and the story in my house goes that in the process of attempting to teach me German as a very young child, I got to the point where I could no longer understand my English-speaking father, who was away at work most of the day. So my mother stopped speaking German to me for several years. Since then she attempted to teach me German, or to force me to read it to her, intermittently for many years.
I took German language classes in elementary school and high school for seven years and I didn't feel that I got very much out of it besides a small increase in my vocabulary. I always got A's but I still had a horrible time with grammar. I feel as though I learned a large portion of German grammar "instinctively" during the initial phase (as a toddler, via immersion), and because of that I have a very, very difficult time learning grammar in the more rigid, structured way it was taught to me in school.
My one attempt at taking a German class in college- a class taught in all German- was more helpful, but not as helpful as I thought an immersion-type class would have been for me. I felt that English being so off-limits hindered me, rather than helped me, because I went out of my way to use simple sentences that I knew were correct rather than ask the correct way to say what I really meant. I've visited Germany many, many times since I was a child. This past winter when we visited, I was rather startled to see that I was thinking in German. It was much easier for me to help guide my mother back to the airport, for instance, in German than it was to say it in English. I was also able to hold conversations with my family, which I hadn't been able to do before. I don't know where any of this came from. Granted, I hadn't been there in six years, but still. Something similar had happened to me two years previous in Costa Rica with my extremely limited Spanish.
ANYWAY.
How the heck can I improve my German? My grammar, especially. Is immersion really the best way, even though it causes me to dumb-down my sentence structure? Are there books or websites that teach in a more intuitive way? Should I try to get my mother to have conversations with me in German? Should I move to Germany? Any and all suggestions will be entertained. Except, perhaps, for joining a German circus.