Hee hee ;) I'm hoping to visit your lovely country in a month or two :D Hoping to visit Cologne (Köln, I think). Would like to get there for a Christmas Market and try to get my very poor attempts at German working again :-[ lol!!
Cologne is a good place to be, but Germany in winter times generally is not. I try to escape the cold days at least for 1 or 2 weeks...
Where did you learn German?
I'm a cold weather person...think I've got Scandinavian blood lol!! My German is only to High School standard. I loved learning it, but since leaving school 21 years ago (WOW!!) I've had little or no use of it! Strange thing is I can understand most of the things that are said to me, but, struggle to answer back in German at the moment!! A friend also told me, we'd been taught the German equivalent of very posh English ;)
Yes, we have lots of dialects here and school german might be "Hochdeutsch", the german which news speakers are talking. Anyway, I had the same problems in France. I had 5 years of french in school but today my french is really shittable. But I understood most of it when they're talking to me (at least when they talk slowly) or when I read it but answering or asking for something was sheer horror...
"Hochdeutsch" that sounds right ;) You think your spoken French is bad ? ;) I've got a very strong Lancastrian (Lancashire) accent and it comes through in any of my attempts at another language lol! Even my spoken English is awful ;) I'm very jealous of other countries schooling of foreign languages, as we only started learning French/German at 11 years old :(