[Sethomas]

You're talking about a lightning round of ten questions? I loved those when I was in quiz bowl. One time when I was a junior in high school, we were given the choice between "German", "The 13th Century", and something else. It was one of those cases where nobody else on the team knew jack shit about anything, so the captain (I was not captain because of political reasons, and I had a crush on ours anyways) looked at me and asked for an answer for what to choose. I told her that I couldn't possibly choose between the two aforementioned subjects and not kick myself later for it, so she closed her eyes for a few seconds and said "German" with a tone of fear in her voice.

It turned out that I got 8 out of 10 of the answers right, wherein I had to translate an English word into German. This was in a tournament setting, so we were able to talk about it later with other teams that chose the subject. The team that did next-best in that subject got 4 or 5 with a combined nine years of in-school German studies among its members. When they heard that we (read: I) got 8 of them right, they asked how many years of German study our team had together. Our coach replied, "yeah, our school doesn't offer German as a class."

That being said, I should note that I can't read formal/academic German for shit. If I listen to a German song I can get the gist of it after a listen or two, but if I pick up a Zeitung or whatever then I tend to attempt to read two sentences and get a headache.