This German Just Got Real (bad)

Guten Tag!  So, I was at the local Brewery Bar last week with some friends from work and I had an experience I would like to share that really opened my eyes and made me understand exactly where my German shortcomings were.

There we were, about 10 of us, just chatting away, drinking our beer and somehow it came out that one of my co-workers spoke fluent German.  Turns out, her Dad moved here from Germany and she was raised bi-lingual.  Well, of course I told her I was learning German and she started to speak it to me.  That's when the crushing blow came...

All of a sudden, I couldn't remember basic vocabulary.  She was talking and I was not processing.  I tried to speak back and baby talk spewed from my mouth.  What was happening?  I knew this stuff.  She was speaking reasonable, short, basic sentences and I was just not getting it.  She actually asked me "Wie viele Biere trinkst du heute Abend?"  This translates to the super simple "How many beers will you have tonight?".  My answer?  "Ummm, uhhh, ja (yes) Bier (beer), ummm..."  She looked at me like I had lost my mind.  I hung my head in shame.


So, I found out 3 things that day:


1.  I'm NOT very good at thinking on my feet in German.
2.  My listening skills could use some sharpening.
3.  I need more automatic "canned"-type responses to help give me time to gather my thoughts.


So, I started thinking about some things I could do to fix these:


1.  The only I can do about thinking on my feet in German is to get more exposure to speaking to native speakers.  No way around it.  The more I talk the better I will listen and the better I will speak.  This one is easy.


2.  I need to kick my listening into high gear.  More movies in German, more dialogs, and more podcasts.  I have several audiobooks in German that I will add into my everyday routine.  Again, verbs are an issue for me because of where they fall in the sentence but I have already addressed verbs in my last post.


3.  I feel like I should explain "canned" responses.  I hadn't really thought of this concept until this day.  I can't help but think that if I had some stock sentences that I felt were automatic that I didn't have to think about then I could have recovered.  These would be sentences that I had drilled and worked on so much that I couldn't help but spew them out even under the most stressful of circumstances.  These would be sentences that steered the conversation in a direction I was comfortable with.  In theory, this would help to de-stress me and as the conversation moved outside of my comfort zone, I could comfortably move with it.


I need to think about #3 some more...  I'll see what i can come up with in a future post.  


Do you have any stories like the one above (positive ones are great too)?


Tschüss!