That awkward moment...

when you try to decide what language you're going to use at the restaurant and accidentally use some weird hybrid that is not decipherable in either.

For example, several months ago I asked for "vass-tur" instead of either water or Wasser. Sigh.

I don't do that so much now but I do get to the point where I still don't have the vocabulary I need.

A positive about this term is that I'm back in German classes at my university after having five months off from university German. In those five months, I learned a lot about German culture, history, and art through other classes, but all in English. I did take some lower level semi-touristy German classes and had about three Volkshochschule classes before my current class started.

I'm super excited because we just learned about splittable verbs, modal (helping) verbs, and the command form. I can say more complex sentences now with the confounding prefix at the end of the sentence -- some verbs like to split off for their own adventures in German! I can now call people up, say that I need to clean up my house, etc. I can also tell people to do things (haha, I shouldn't let this one go to my head).

I was thrilled, for example, to be able to tell the lady at the Halloween festival we attended to literally "cut You Formal more please," which she took as "cut that more please" so I could share the naan in more pieces with my friends. I'm not sure if I said it grammatically but she knew what I meant so that was a success!