Hi there! I´t Jana!

[Jana]

Hey! It´s so nice that so many pf you speak German! I´m very surprised! And don´t bother, your German isn´t bad! I know how easy it is to forget lenguages.. I once learned Spanish and I can still understand a bit but never ask me to speak it myself And it´s always very hard for me to get back into my English and French classes after 6 weeks of summer break.

how i came to simple living.. I think I don´t really have an explanation. On one hand I´m a person with big aims, i want to launch a career, earn money and BE ABLE to live a decent live. But it´s just about the opportunity, not about really doing it. But on the other hand i can go shopping a whole day without buying anything, even thoug i have enough money with me to but about every creepy stuff I see (i tried it once..it was easier than you think)
I´m someone who is concerned about what´s going on in this world. some years ago i was just consuming a lot as every other teenage girl my age. but when i got problems with my skin because of too many chemicals and i got into that whole thing i started to change my atitude towards most of the conventional products and i changed to more sustainable products like organic food and cosmetics, but within the time i started to reduce everything and think about what i really do need and what I don´t need. Sometimes I think I still live too boastful, but i try to work on it.I always think that some years ago, people were living without XXX, so why schouldn´t i be able to quit as well?
I´m trying to see oursociety more critical, i want to get to know what´s behind our behavior, i want to know the variety of aspects like how economy works and how it infulences our buying behavior and things like that, so that i can react to it and build my own opinion. But believe me, I´m still far from knowing everything I want to know as I´m not even having my A-Levels yet.

I hope you understand everything I wrote because my English is not that good, so if there are any serious mistakes please tell me so I can improve my English and I´ll get prepared for my final exams and my term papers (Would be embarassing if I´m the one to make the worst mistakes as I´m one of the only persons who are really interested in English in my course)

Greetings

[herbgeek]

Ich habe Deutsch im Universitat gelernt, aber ich vergass meistens.

[SteveinMN]

I hope you understand everything I wrote because my English is not that good, so if there are any serious mistakes please tell me so I can improve my English and I´ll get prepared for my final exams and my term papers

Jana, I will go out on a limb and state that your English is probably better than the German most of us have been using here. A suggestion I would make is that, if you can, use an English spelling/grammar checker to catch mistakes (typographical errors, subject/verb disagreement, and so on. You seem to express your thoughts well and I know this is not a very formal forum. But if you do want to improve your written English, that will help. Even us native English speakers need that kind of help!

[Jana]

Hey =)
Thank´s for the hint! What kind of spelling checker du you normally use? Just Mircosoft Word or something better?
And sorry that I´m very formal but I´m not really used to the "real" English how it´s spoken. But this will improve soon, I think.

[SteveinMN]

Hey =)
Thank´s for the hint! What kind of spelling checker du you normally use? Just Mircosoft Word or something better?
And sorry that I´m very formal but I´m not really used to the "real" English how it´s spoken. But this will improve soon, I think.

The spelling checker in Word is fine. And you'll learn "real" English quickly. You already do pretty well. It will take you a lot less time to speak colloquial American English, I think, than it did for me to understand "Dust mir!" because we don't have formal forms of verbs in English. :-)

[Jana]

"Dust mir!"

Didn´t know that one. In which part of Germany did you hear that one? Because it´s a really strange dialect. I only know "Duasch mr" (thats how it´s spoken here) and it´s kind of "Könntest du bitte..... für mich machen" like: Could you please do ... for me?

Oh, and I hope that i won´t learn the spoken American too quickly because I´m quite sure that my teachers wouldn´t be too pleased by this development

[SteveinMN]

Didn´t know that one. In which part of Germany did you hear that one? Because it´s a really strange dialect. I only know "Duasch mr" (thats how it´s spoken here) and it´s kind of "Könntest du bitte..... für mich machen" like: Could you please do ... for me?

I heard that (or something like it) in Berlin in 1990. A friend of a German-American friend of mine allowed me to use the familiar form of verbs rather than the formal conjugation when I spoke with him. Maybe I assumed it was "dust" because of du (familiar) and the regular "st" ending of verbs in that form ... ?

That was the same trip during which I learned that German spoken by happy getting-drunk people at a wedding is VERY hard to understand lol

[Jana]

Oh jeah, the dialek in Berlin is... strange. I was there last fall and every time we heard someone talking with this strong dialekt it´s really funny because even us Germans don´t understand a lot. But I think for people who live in Berlin going to the "Oktoberfest" (I think ya all know, don´t you?) ti Munich it mut be hard to understand, too. Because the real Munich people with theit dialekt AND drunk... no pleasure
Are there so many dialects in the US, too? Because in Germany about every region has its own one. But Germany is weird in general... we don´t even have the same educational system all across the country. (Depending on where you are and on what kind of shool you visit it can take you 12 or 13 years for our A-levels.. Crazy, isn´t it?)

[SteveinMN]

Are there so many dialects in the US, too? Because in Germany about every region has its own one.

The U.S. has some regional differences, but I don't think most of them are as big as the differences between, for example, standard "high German" and Schwäbisch (another place where communication took extra effort for me and my hosts!). I would say there are maybe seven major dialects in the U.S. among people for whom American English is their first (or only) language. Some word choices are very distinctive (ask the native Minnesotans on this forum to complete the name of the children's game "Duck, duck, _________"). I'm not sure how to classify the speech of many African-Americans, which I find to have a distinct sound across the U.S. even if the word choices are localized geographically.

[Jana]

Lol, schwäbisch thats wgat i can speak and understand. :-)
greeze from france (been speaking french all day long and i`m so tired now)