Requiem for my German

My German ability is dying :=( Before I came here, especially after spending 3 weeks in Italy with a bunch of Germans I was pretty fluent, about C1 level on the Common European Framework, maybe even C2 in speaking, but now I can barely string a coherent sentence together, seriously, every time I try some kind of horrible, inconsistent-tense ridden half Japanese garbage comes out my mouth :-( for example, I routinely produce something similar to the following: "Tja, ケッコだな、aber jetzt bin ich so 忙しい,vieleicht 後で konnen wir etwas するね." I`m sure my second language acquisition teacher would be very happy to get her hands on that little example of code-mixing... Speaking of which, she`s doing a study on comparisons between native and 2nd language speakers in Japanese and English at the moment, and as we`re (Shin, Yume, Mark and I, the foreign students in the class) are the most readily available native English speakers around (except Mark, who slept in that morning...) we`re her guinea-pigs. Basically it involves sitting around chatting with English learning Japanese students in both languages. To put that another way we take it in turns to bludgeon each others language. Except Yume who`s as the teacher put it: "Like a native" speaker in both. Possibly because SHE`S HALF JAPANESE (I hope she reads this... She doesn`t want people to know that because people think she`s less interesting, ie, less foreign.). Oh, and I asked her if she had any tips for saving my German and she basically said "頑張って" Which basically means "good luck"...

Oh, and the other day in Translation Studies we were looking at Interlingual translation from Ancient Japanese to Modern Japanese. I understood about 5% of that lecture, no joke. The examples looked like they were written in frikkin Chinese! No kana (letters) what so ever, and then even in the later ones they had these really weird ones which I still couldn`t read.

Oh, and my Supervisor likes showing his students British movies, though after Trainspotting and This is England, can anybody think of some that don`t make the UK out to be a terribly depressing place to live. Suggests of Bridget Jones` Diary or Love Actually not appreciated. Also, they already watched Love Actually 2 weeks ago...