A few weeks ago my company held a firm-wide meeting discussing our future growth direction. The content is not important, what is important is that the meeting was (obviously) completely in German.
And then the most surprising thing – I actually understood a lot of it!
Ok, the first part anyway – but that was a good hour!
If you want to stay in Austria for any length of time there is a basic German language test that inevitably, you have to take.
I started preparing for this as soon as I arrived, studying doggedly for two hours a day, painfully learning pronunciation with my Ukranian teacher. It helped not having a job – I had such a lot of time and a high desire to use my brain.
They say that the A1 test can be passed in three months, with two hours of study a day. I can tell you for a fact that I was nowhere near ready after three months. I still felt like a drunk fruitcake whenever I tried to speak German.
