I am now a week into my second class. My new teacher is a lot younger, and thus has a very different approach to language learning. She focuses a lot on writing, which is a nice change as this is something that I could always use practice with. It forces me to slow down and really consider my grammar and word choices, as opposed to speaking where I have to move quickly. We have to write a short essay every single day, and the corrections that I have gotten back so far have helped me to pinpoint the mistakes that I make regularly so I can address them. We have also been getting into super advanced grammar. The nightly homework has been helpful in practicing these skills. I have been trying to use these new formations when I speak to my friends or locals outside of class. Applying the skills to real conversations is a strategy that I’ve found to work really well in effectively building language skills. One recent cultural experience I had was visiting the BMW world. Engineering, particularly relating to cars, is an important cultural area for Germans, as well as a great source of pride for the country. Besides learning a lot about the vehicles, it was an interesting language exercise. I had never experienced many of the technical vocabulary words before, so I got extensive practice learning to best use context to make an educated guess as to what certain words meant. Once I did that, I would check myself against the English translations of the information boards to see how well I did. By the end of the BMW Museum tour, I could translate the entire paragraphs with very few mistakes!