Thanks for the advice! I’m definitely going to do the label thing. Since I’m leaving in 6 days I’ll try and find some current students when I arrive to help me. And I might take you up on that offer for German…or Swedish. If living in foreign countries for two years doesn’t motivate me to get proficient in a language I don’t know what will.

Random thought for you on this one, though: I found it immensely helpful to have a speaking companion, someone who is a native speaker in your target language AND knows your native language very well. When I was in Norway, most of the population knew English nearly as well as Norwegian, and all of them wanted to speak to me in English. My friend whom I was staying with encouraged me to try Norwegian with them. My one attempt, I have to admit, failed a bit badly with a cashier, who finally said to me, with a huge smile, “Would it be easier if we spoke English to finish up this transaction?” I sheepishly nodded and kept going in English.

So, my suggestion would actually be to see if you can find an exchange student who would be willing to Skype with you for a couple hours a week (or meet you for coffee, if they are so inclined and are nearby) to simply speak their native language. Sometimes all they want is to talk to someone in their native tongue for a while, or maybe you could trade skills (computer/website help, etc).

I also found it helpful when I was in my language courses to label everything – and I mean everything – in my room with stickies written in the language I was aiming for. So, therefore, every time I looked at my desk, my eyes saw “skrivbord”, and my head translated desk to skrivbord. I would even mutter “skrivbord” under my breath. My roommate probably would have thought I was crazy if I didn’t already have a habit of muttering to myself while working on classwork and if she wasn’t doing the same thing with Spanish 🙂

Just some thoughts! Oh, and let me know if you need to learn some Swedish, Norwegian, or German!

I’m going to get a Hungarian language tourist book this weekend so I can just concentrate on the important phrases. I’ll leave the more complex stuff for the CEU survival Hungarian course.

In future posts I’ll try to link to some of the reviews and other sites I come across while searching.