AMD 4 - Benjamin Oztalay

For this AMD, I created an account on livemocha and chatted with someone from Germany. I gotta say, I was very surprised at my ability to create sentences and find words and put the right words in the right place. That last part is what I'm least confident about when I speak German. However, when I was writing sentences out, I found that if I put a word in the wrong place, it sounded weird to me, so I would just move it to where it felt correct. With just a little help from Google translate on a few words, I was able to understand everything he said. We shared some cultural stuff, since we're both Turkish.

Before we started talking, I was pretty nervous about being able to understand him, but I found that I knew 95% of the words he used (although, our conversation wasn't particularly complex or deep). After we talked for a bit, I was pretty comfortable just talking in German. What slowed me down the most was typing letters with umlauts! I might have to switch to a German keyboard layout. Having a conversation with someone outside of class really helped bring everything together in a larger context. As opposed to studying and practicing one aspect of German at a time, it was all there at the same time, so I could see how everything fit together. I think what helped me the most, in terms of what we've learned, is definitely vocab. Just having a vocab of the 500ish words we've learned so far was key. It seems like you could get by alright in Germany armed with a large vocabulary and the present tense.