As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, we’ve had two public holidays during our four week course so have lost two days.  So today we tried to get as much done as possible!

We started by reading longer passages (e.g. short stories) and trying to answer some true/false questions about them.  It’s really great that I now understand a lot of it, and it’s brilliant to see how much progress I’ve made in four weeks.  Hopefully I can keep it up after Thursday!We then continued the tricky work we’ve been doing on sentences with a second person in them (i.e. using me, you, her, him etc), before doing something that I found incredible difficult – telling the difference between u and ü.  It sounds like a very subtle difference to me, but is very important if I want people to understand me.  For example, ‘Bruder’ is German for ‘brother’, but ‘Brüder’ is German for ‘brothers’.  Similarly, ‘Mutter’ translates to ‘mother’ and ‘Mütter’ to ‘mothers’.  I’ve been practising at home, and will continue to do so until I get it right! :)The last half of our penultimate lesson was spent asking each other ‘Was machst du gern?’ (‘what do you like doing (in your free time)?’) and asking what the time was (‘Wie viel Uhr ist es?’).  We were told that it helps to be very specific about what time it is whist in Germany. ;)My next blog will be my last as we only have one lesson left to go.  Our teacher, Bettina, has suggested we all go out to the beer garden to celebrate reaching the end of the course.  I’m going to take my camera, so will post a few pictures of us on my last entry tomorrow.