Language Issues

I took a total of three years of German in high school and college, but the last one ended more than six years ago so I am fairly rusty with what German I know. I am however a big supporter of the idea of being bilingual (even if becoming bilingual is much more difficult) and think that it really would be very rude of me to not put in the effort to learn as much as I can in the weeks before I go to Germany and to become fluent as quickly as I can once I get there, particularly since I am young and could be there for a very long time. Hopefully the immersion will improve my decidedly spotty pronunciation.

In attempting to improve my German the things that I have found most helpful are using the Rosetta Stone German language software and attempting to read things written in German, such as websites and some of the correspondence I have had with my future employer (which has also forced me to do some writing in German). Fortunately, I know several people who have been kind enough to help me with translating and understanding translations when my own abilities have been inadequate.

At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, the Rosetta Stone software really does work well, my word retention is much better with it than it was in my previous German classes. The downside is that since it is a beginner's course I haven't gotten much on the mechanics of grammar (there may be more of that later on, I don't know yet) and while the vocabulary that I'm learning is important, there isn't a lot of business related words or terms, which would be helpful for my situation.

However, I have found that I have also picked up a fair amount by using German language websites. Some sites, such as for German stores (such as ikea.de or aldi-sued.de) are actually fairly easy to use untranslated since there isn't a whole lot of complex stuff, and that can be run through an on-line translater like AltaVista's Babel Fish which generally provides a decent translation, though not always a completely accurate one. Other websites, and information have required much more work and while the Babel Fish translator is a good start, I have found that my German-English Dictionary is invaluable, particularly when dealing with words that have more than one possible meaning. While I can't say that the result of working with German language websites has been that I am now fluent, it has helped me feel more comfortable with the language and I have picked up some new words this way. As a final suggestion, if you use Babel Fish to translate entire websites keep the website in the original language up, sometimes the links will work better that way and once again, you might pick up some words.