My parents are American, but I lived in Germany until I was seven. I was as fluent as any German my age—relatives who visited us from the States even tell me that I used German to speak to any adult other than my parents.
Unfortunately, it’s been almost twenty years, and my German is mostly gone, especially the vocabulary. For some reason though, I remember German’s rules much better than I remember specific words. For instance, the V2 sentence structure feels completely familiar to me, but I’d forgotten that “die Kartoffel” means “the potato.” I’ve been using DuoLingo, but in some ways it’s too easy, because of the vocab-grammar disparity. My pronunciation is also still good; singing Bach definitely helped. So I’m in this weird situation where I can sound like a native speaker if I stick to certain topics, and I can often passively understand it to some extent, but I can’t produce a novel sentence in a conversation to save my life.
So I’m wondering if anyone knows of any apps that let you personalize your learning plans a bit more. Or should I just suck it up and make my own Anki cards and buy an exercise book? There’s also a German-speaking network in my city which I’m going to check out so I can occasionally work on conversation, although I’m not going to kid myself into thinking that that will be enough to really revitalize my skills. If anyone has any other tips, they’d be greatly appreciated.
Also, my work means that right now, I can’t realistically commit to more than maybe three or four hours per week of structured study-time. I know that that’s going to limit what I can do, but I’d like to use that time as productively as possible.
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