New Braunfels, where we have retired, is a small German town in the Texas Hill Country where German, though a slightly strange version, is still spoken. So why did I buy the Rosetta Stone German course? I am of German ancestry, find the language to be interesting, and would like to be more proficient. It was a lot of fun and we met some nice people, so two weeks ago, we joined the 10 session advanced German course. Last year the local German American society sponsored a one evening a week 20 session intro to German in which wife and I participated. In fact the first Dutch that I learned in the Dutch class was "Nee nee dat is Duits" (no, no that is German). I learned a lot of Dutch in those three years, but had the continuous problem of saying things in Dutch when talking to Germans and in German when talking to the Dutch. Most of you are probably aware that Dutch and German are very similar in many ways, but are also very different in others. So after a month in the country, the NAM sent me off to a two week crash course in conversational Dutch. Although the business language of Shell International and most of the 300 or so Shell companies is English, I spent the first of the three years working for the NAM (not Viet Nam but Nederlands Aardolie Maatschappij - translation Dutch Oil Company) where the business language is Dutch. Forgot it that is until in early 1996 I took a three year assignment with Shell in the Netherlands. He also let me be one of his graders, which gave me a bit of spending money.Īfter graduation in 1963, I did not have cause to use German and promptly forgot it. I told him I didn't want to do that so the next year he put me in third year German with half a dozen German majors in which we read works by Goethe, Lessing and Schiller.
I did very well the first year so my prof, the head of the German department, tried to convince me to switch my major from mechanical engineering to German, especially since at that time my German grades were much better than my engineering grades. I studied German while going to Rice University in the early 1960s.