I met Mickey Mangan through the fellowship program that has taken us both to Germany for the year. Upon our arrival here last August, we were both part of the lucky crew that got sent to the town of Radolfzell on Lake Constance for 2 months of language school. Mickey and I both came into the program with little knowledge of the language, and so I had the privilege of spending the whole time there in the same class as Mickey.
Being the creative genius that he is - and that's just the simple truth - Mickey had the idea to create a weekly talk show to record the progress of his language learning. Each week he posts a new episode of "The Lernen to Talk Show" on his blog, Fourth Thing. Each 'sode is about 5 minutes long.
My language skills progressed at about the same rate as Mickey's did to begin with, and now I get to see where he has progressed and I haven't and vice versa. It's a good documentation of what learning a language is like. Also, Mickey has a zest for life and is one of the most consistently enthusiastic people I know. The passion that he has for the things he undertakes is one of his best attributes, and it shows in his work.
If you're a German native speaker, you'll probably get an even bigger kick out of this than us non-native speakers. Mickey goes through the trouble to make notes of the various errors that occur throughout each episode, but as a native speaker, you'll hear them right away. Sometime the mistakes are adjective endings, but sometimes it's the difference between saying "sausages"- "Würste"- and "deserts"- "Wüsten" (see Episode 27 in which he tries to explain the board game Settlers of Catan to a couple friends).
You can access every episode chronologically by clicking here. It is amazing to see how far he has come since Episode One! Gut gemacht, Mickey. Lass nicht locker!
...and now I give you Episode 1 of the Lernen to Talk Show, filmed in Dulles airport on July 31, 2011 as our group is about to fly away for a year of life "auf Deutsch" in Germany.
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