Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you all!

Hope you could all relax and enjoy the Christmas break, didn’t catch any of the awful bugs going around and could recharge your batteries for 2023. I had a lovely family Christmas (with too much food of course), sent my laptop on holiday for a week and have welcomed it back with energy and new ideas for 2023.

So what have you got planned this year? Any exciting trips or events? I am very much looking forward to June when I am finally going to do a road trip through East Germany, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. My dear friend Bernd has agreed to take a week off from his beloved opera (he is quite fanatical 😊) and show me Erfurt, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden, Annaberg-Buchholz and back through Bamberg. To keep him in a good mood, we are going to the Semperoper in Dresden which will be quite a highlight.

I know a lot of you will want to do more to improve your English skills this year (I say the same for my moderate French expertise every year). As it is difficult to know what to do, I would like to suggest spending 20 minutes a day for a week trying five different options and seeing which one fits best into your lifestyle. If it doesn’t, it will be difficult to incorporate it into your routine – believe me! One year, I firmly planned to read a French novel but as I don’t read many English novels, I gave up after a week …

Here are five ideas:

• Listen to an English podcast (e.g. on BBC Sounds) or TED talk. I am a real fan of the latter and often download a talk to listen to on a walk or in the car
• Read an article in Spotlight or Business Spotlight – both excellent magazines which have vastly improved in the last year
• Watch a series in US or British English (depending on your focus) – just a half or whole episode a day. But make sure it is something you would watch (or already have watched) in your own language and use subtitles it necessary. This way you can look forward to it every day.
• Go for an English walk with your partner or a friend. Some of you may remember my late husband and I used to practise French once a week in the pool but correcting each other was strictly forbidden!
• Use one of the many apps such as BBC Learning English (my favourite) for 20 minutes a day.

Of course, you don’t need to limit it to 20 minutes a day but it is important to be kind to yourself … If you fancy a short refresher course, just let me know and we can talk about an individual programme for you. For everyone who has regular courses, I am looking forward to seeing you this week or next to catch up on your news!