Party Vibe

it is not that difficult to learn for an English speaker (although Dutch is easier grammar wise but harder with pronunciation) ; especially someone from the North as your local dialect is more Germanic in its origins. The hardest bit is the retention of various parts of the case structure from Latin and everything having a gender but when writing German there are plenty of online crib sheets around. When speaking in border areas there are various dialects which though seen as “lower class” are more similar to Dutch. As Germany is a fairly large country dialects vary to the point some folk speak English to each other as neither can understand each others German!

I could not learn German at high school as the options system double booked it with Computer Studies (basic Computer Science) – could only study French which annoyed me as there were so many developments in computer science which came from DE and surrounding countries.

Over the years I taught myself mostly by buying charity shop books; listening to German on the radio whenever possible (via medium wave and shortwave) and using the Internet as a resource when it became available.

it was only because of some Austrian idiot and his behaviour in the last century that the international language of science switched to English – it may well have been German; although it was another Austrian who encouraged me to keep up with German – Falco was then in the charts with Rock Me Amadeus…

Coincidentally the French had a similar system called minitel which also got used for all sorts like booking sex workers; sorting out drug deals etc, passing on rave info (it lasted well into the 2000s); a hangover from this system was those french teknival partylines with * and # codes in them..