I love how things work out sometime–just as I start feeling like I’m never going to make any progress with German, I get my first feeling of comfort with the language the next day.

It’s just a simple thing–we turned the page in the book, and we were learning how to say that things are broken or don’t work. The flashlight is out of battery, the car is out of gas, the lamp is unplugged. But the way to say something is broken is that it is kaputt!! This is a word that is used all the time in the US, in the Midwest, but it’s not an official word. I don’t know if it would even be in the dictionary. Everyone would know what you meant if you said it, though, and it really brought back memories of home. It made me feel so happy and good about German, and it really renewed my enthusiasm to get studying and start speaking!

Sometimes, little things make all the difference. You never know what or when, but when that feeling of familiarity hits, it brings with it waves of good associations and feelings of home. Just what I needed to re-energize my studies.