Currently I often catch myself playing a game with myself. I call it the “Can-you-say-this-in-english” game and it is mostly about coming up with the english version of things I just said, wrote or write. I try to translate everything I hear or say at work or in my free time in my head and actually I have a feeling it works.

As I told you before my english skills are pretty good. I can write and understand english without many problems. My only problem is that I don’t feel very comfortable speaking english. This may be a consequence of the absence of speaking english in my life. I read books and watch TV and movies in english since I was 18, but I spoke english very rarely.

It may sound weird, but with talking to myself in my head while playing my little game, I kind of get used to myself speaking english. I had a phone interview for a job this week and even if I may have sounded a bit confused and not very experienced to the people at the end of the line, I felt kind of comfortable talking to them.

My friend Petra who moved to London in 2007 always tells me that she still has the most problems with speaking english on the phone. I think it is a good sign that I manage to talk to americans on the phone already, but I still know that I have to learn a lot!

By the way: If you are planning to move to the US in the future and want to improve your english skills and vocabulary range, I suggest watching movies, series and reading books. I developed a huge word pool during the last years including (funny) words like pacifier, janitor, brussels sprouts, mortgage or bombshell and building sentences kind of comes natural by now. But watch out: Knowing colloquial language is nice, but not always adaquate.

One of my good friends is in the hospital since yesterday. Her stomach hurt really bad since Thursday, so she decided it would be better to see a doctor. Actually it was better, because she had to go under surgery yesterday. When I visited her in the hospital today and she told me the whole story of her condition, I actually began to wonder what I will do in the future when something like this happens to me!

In Germany I would surely just go and see a doctor or go to the hospital, but in the US I would be pretty unsecure if I had ugly pains. It is pretty scary to think about going to a hospital in a country where you can’t understand any medical language. For sure my english is pretty good and I normally understand nearly everything, but guess what the only TV series is I can’t fully understand – it’s Grey’s Anatomy.

Sure all the doctors in this series are charming and so willing to explain every condition a hundred times, if the patient needs it. But I know from german hospitals that this is fiction. And that reality is cruel. Perhaps I should get some kind of medical dictionary to be prepared for future visits to the hospital, but I don’t think that this would make it less scarier for me.

It’s very likely that my first visit to a hospital in the US will be the birth of our first child one day and in that situation I might be better off with not understanding everything. But till then I will try to hold my unrealistic image of every american hospital being like the Seattle Grace alive and keep on dreaming of a charming Patrick Dempsey giving birth to my first child one day. The time to wake up from this dream will come soon enough.