If you know English, you know a good bit of German. The sentence structure gets a bit weird (monolingual American here, but I’m trying). Pick up Duolingo and get at it.
And don’t stop or the owl will kill you.
I mean, halt nicht an oder sonst bringt dich die Eule an.
Nicht perfekt, aber komplett verständlich. Wenn du ohne großen Aufwand üben willst, könntest du versuchen gelegentlich einen Streamingdienst oder ähnliches auf Deutsch mit englischen Untertiteln umzustellen. Ähnliches hat mir vor Ewigkeiten sehr mit meinem Englisch geholfen.
It took me a number of years to get to fluency but the biggest things that helped me were the following:
uses classes/tools to learn the basic grammar so that you can recognize more or less what is going on (even if you don’t always understand the individual words)
switch as much media consumption as possible to be exclusively German. I spent 6 months watch exclusively German shows/TV, reading German news, listening to German music. Eventually I kind of trained myself to switch my inner-monologue to German whenever I wanted.
After that it’s just practice practice practice. Also it helped me a ton to stop worrying about getting everything “right” when speaking. Better to speak fluently while occasionally fucking up the der/die/das than to stumble because I’m stressing over every sentence!
Let’s see how this will pan out, Munich did something similar, but between conservative opposition, lobbying efforts by Microsoft and people complaining about compatibility issues and changes in workflow, it ended up being reversed. That was a while ago, though, and Linux on desktop only got better since then.
EDIT: Yeah, they mention that in the article, seems it really is going at it from a different angle this time.
With people after a certain age working in administrative bodies you can be sure of one thing. Someone will whine and complain either “we never did it this way” or “we always did it this way”.
I’ve noticed this a lot working for the federal government. Some people just can’t be bothered to keep up with the times. They just piss and moan about any changes, even if it’s beneficial and more efficient.
According to Investigate Europe, it had nothing to do with opposition or compatibility issues. Was a backroom deal between the mayor and Microsoft to kill the initiative in exchange for their German HQ being moved to Munich.
Edit: Just double-checked, looks like Munich was considering migrating to Linux again, but critics believe this may just be a negotiating tactic to extract more concessions from Microsoft.
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