On Language

In the past week, I have realized that I have less than 3 months left here, which is a scary thought.  Suddenly my friends and I are planning trips like crazy, trying to find a way to fit in going everywhere we want to see.
But taking a step back from that, I know that one thing that I have to take advantage of as much as possible before leaving is being immersed in German.  My situation is also rather unique because it's not often that I'm distanced from my own language.
At home, I can simply listen and talk without ever having to use much mind power to consider proper grammar or words.  When I talk, I am usually never consciously aware that at that moment I'm talking in English.  Instead, I'm simply just communicating.  I also don't analyze posters for grammatical constructions and look up words very often when I'm reading at home.
Here daily life has turned into a learning situation, which is both a good and bad thing.  Of course, there's no better way to learn German than to hear it everywhere, see it everywhere, and speak it in all types of interactions.  I try to be a sponge and just soak everything up, though I really have no idea how successful I am at that.  Sometimes I'm surprised by words I actually do know and realize I am learning, yet other times I know that the only way to learn grammar is to put in the effort to read the rules and practice.  At the same time, I am also looking forward to going back to a place where I don't have to spend hours drafting e-mails, listening to conversations with full concentration, and most importantly, where I can finally express myself to my full extent using the words I want to.  At some times, speaking German goes quite well, but at other times, I just can't convey what I want to, which can be quite frustrating.
I'm so used to hearing German around me that the occasional times I hear American on the street it sounds almost foreign in the sense that it just sounds so different than German in its vowels and rhythm.  German has a bad reputation, but in my opinion, it is for the most part actually a very beautiful language (when not being angrily screamed).  I've gotten to the point where I almost feel in between languages at times.  I have trouble expressing myself in German, yet when I speak English often times German words for things pop into my head first.  It is a rather strange phenomenon!
And the distance from English makes me consider things like the following:
The word "yes" is obviously how we express agreement in English, but when speaking, many people say "yeah."  This is something that isn't ever really taught, but has caught on.  I remember when I was much younger trying to figure out how to spell "yeah" because it's not something you learn in school either.  It's amazing to think how little words like this are shared by an entire culture of people without having much of an official status.  The difficulty for me as an English assistant is then having to explain these little rules - when do we say "yes" and when do we say "yeah."

For those of you who want to hear some German:
German Audiobook example
Another example (from their version of Candid Camera) (where they pretend other people own someone's car and that that person's car has been taken to the used car lot and just sold)