“How good is your German?”

I have been living in Germany for a little over 4 years.

Technically speaking, I learnt German at school for a year. I passed my oral exam for level C1 in the Goethe institute test, but unfortunately I missed a few points in the written exam.
We speak mainly German at home. When I was working in my last company in Munich, I had to speak German, work with German email, software/computer interface … everything in German.

But even I can express the meaning in German, I know that my grammar and my accent, my pronunciation etc. still have a lot of room for improvement. In my opinion, German is much more difficult compare to English. In that short period of time, I tried my best to master the language as soon as possible, but I’m still far from the level I was hoping for.

A week ago I spoke to my friend in New York (in English). When my husband came to me, I spoke briefly to him in German. My friend was so impressed and she thinks my German sounds very good and fluent. I told her, yes, it was fluent, but with a lot of grammatical mistakes and poor pronunciation. I said that she thought my German is “good” was only because she didn’t understand the language.

Speaking of which, my English got a lot worse after living in Germany. This is not only because I don’t use the language that often, but also…