Hi Not sure whether posting here will get me anywhere, but I'd rather give it a shot on a forum I visit every day before I sign up to a more specialist one only to write one post. Not exactly tech related, but I guess neither is posting about films and music I have a lot of spare time on my hands while I'm waiting for the next work contract to start and wanted to do something useful, not that gaming on my pc and ps3 are bad, but hey - few jobs have Playing Games listed in required skills. I've browsed through a bunch of language courses for German, but can't find anything that would suit my needs. Polish is my native language and I'm pretty fluent in English, having completed a three year BA at King's College London. I studied Russian, German, Latin and Ancient Greek; though all of them only for a year and quite a long time ago. I was changing schools a lot during high school, which is why I stopped learning the first two and I did Classical languages at uni since I was stupid enough to blow my one and only golden ticket to higher education (tuition fee loan) on studying Ancient History. I am generally quite capable when it comes to studying languages as long as I work diligently. I am familiar with the metalanguage since Polish has probably the most difficult and bloated Grammar of all the Indo-European languages. My problem is that the textbooks I've been looking at are written for Englishmen, who most likely had very little contact with grammar, even within their own language. Generally they are way too lenient and sometimes they just skip the explanation of how the language works, instead focusing on phrases one would use in certain situations. I like the approach of Hammer's German Grammar and Usage by Martin Durrell, or Essential German Grammar by the same author. Problem is, these are reference books for people who speak the language at an intermediate level at the very least. To give an example of a perfect (imho) textbook, I present you with "Reading Latin" by Peter V. Jones and Keith C. Sidwell. It's an academic text book designed for university students who have no knowledge of Latin at the beginning of the course. It ramps up difficulty quickly and pulls no punches. If you are lazy this book will destroy you, but if you spend some quality time with it, you will be rewarded quickly. Tried to find something similar on Amazon, but no luck so far. I should also add, that I will not have access to a teacher, tutor, classes etc. This has to be strictly self taught, A-Z.
I can't recommend anything as I can only speak one language myself. Having read your post I'd like to commend you on your excellent English language. I certainly wouldn't describe it as "pretty" fluent
