I should learn how to speak english.
You do just fine-I don't think anyone has ever missed your point in a discussion anyway.
Thanks very much to Myrthos, Gorath, Arhu, HiddenX, and Alrik for the hands-on links and suggestions about German media--I've bookmarked them all. I actually do have a friend who'll be traveling to the UK next month--I may ask him to see what he can pick up in the way of DVDs and video games--VPeric--that's a great idea about playing Gothic in German if I can find a copy. Gothic is one of my favorite games and having played it already, there'll be some familiarity with the gist of the dialogue. Same with the newspaper--world news covers familiar topics and has a journalistic style that repeats itself regardless of the language.
@Atrachasis: Opera is also an interesting suggestion-easy to find and sure to have a translation. It works, too--in jr. high school I had a strange infatuation with Puccini's
Turandot and could sing and understand lots of it before I moved on to things like the Beatles and other teenage girl stuff.
@GhanburiGhan--you know, I think there may be a small town around here somewhere that was originally settled by Germans--also, the college in my town does have a lot of foreign exchange students, so you may be right.
I think the internet is going to be my greatest resource. There are two colleges that offer German language studies in the area, but both won't have the beginner courses offered til the Fall semester.Sometimes I regret living out here with the cowboys--for instance, the closest branch of the Goethe-Institut is in Chicago, about 800 miles away--but it also has it's good points; they just aren't multi-cultural.
For those of you who have learned your English informally and on your own initiative, I want you to know you're a great example, because you speak it better as a second language than many of my countrymen do as natives. Thanks so much for all the help.
Edit-@HiddenX--interesting how all those languages are related. I actually spoke some Swedish when I was a small child around my grandparents-I could understand more than I could speak. As they always used it to talk about things they didn't want me to hear, I was highly motivated.
Maybe that will be a bit of help.