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I arrived in Berlin, terrified of sounding like a toddler and a moron while trying to speak German. So, I just didn’t — I spoke English. After a while in Berlin, I signed up for another language course, again starting at the beginning. This time it was serious: three hours a day, five days a week, for four months.

I’ve learned that the only way to really learn a language is to soak yourself in it. I try to maximize my exposure to everything German as often as possible. One of my favorite ways to do this is to catch as much native content as possible.

It is wonderful to live in the civilized world of Berlin.

A convenient map of Berlin's famous Berlin U-Bahn and Berlin S-Bahn

When the tour boats rife with rooftop tourists on white plastic chairs glide along the Spree, when the pale-flanked Europeans in tank tops quaff beer on makeshift bar beaches, when the sky is blue and not low clouds of steel gray, when the Fernsehturm glints and glimmers in a bright spiritual cross, then it is surely approaching tourist season in Berlin, Germany.

I don’t know how many people have actually been to Berlin — and with my friends, I am sure most of them; however, everyone always asks where I live. I guess you can say I live in Moabit, Berlin, or Tiergarten. Heck, I think it is important to just show you… you’ll get a much better idea.

I have a little corporate apartment in Berlin, in an unfashionable neighborhood called Moabit, right across from the main train station, Berlin Hauptbahnhof. My business partner, Mark, also spends half of his year—the warm months—in Berlin. He fell for the city while an exchange student in high school and he’s fluent in German.

I like to rib my German friends in Berlin because they’re always wearing these silly Chairman Mao hats — everyone wears OD green and black caps. If you want some good advice to help you look cool while visiting or living in Berlin, please just dress like a distressed communist revolutionary student protester… blue jeans, Adidas soccer shoes, hoodies, leather coats or bomber jackets — dark colors — but you can wear these until you’re deep in your 40s so buying an assortment of them is a worthwhile investment. I like to call it “Vanguard of the Proletariat Fashion.”

In the middle of my German language learning travails, Rosetta Stone reached out to me and asked me to blog about my language-learning process in light of being able to try out their new solution, Rosetta Stone TOTALe. So, here I am.

I arrived in Berlin, Travis picked me up at Tegel, and then we tried to get into my apartment here to no avail. All of our elaborate”where’s my key” backup systems broke down so I have been working a little, taking a serious nap, and waiting until I hear from the upstairs neighbor.