How to keep up-to-date with German when not living in Germany

One of the hazards of not living abroad is language loss. Language loss starts creeping up on you within a few years abroad and nibbles at the edges of your language skills. First, you start searching for words that you don’t use very often, and which come to mind easier in the new language. Then your friends back home start laughing when you open your mouth because you have started using syntactic or idiomatic constructions that are clearly translated from your new language. Among your fellow bilinguals in the new country, a new language starts emerging – the “mixed” language: for Germans, Genglish or Denglish, for Spaniards in Brazil or Portugal or Brazilians in Spanish-speaking countries, Portunhol, for Spanish-speakers in the U.S., Spanglish … I can’t think of a good word that mixes Russian and English, but these two get mixed as well, of course. Bilinguals hop easily from one language to the other and do not think much of it. But when they do think about it and some of them get scared and impose the “one language only” rule and try to keep to it.
Among translators, language loss is not such a big problem, because they use all their languages on a very regular basis, so the constant practice keeps the language alive. But for translators, another issue becomes vital – how do I keep up-to-date on the language/s of the country/ies that I don’t live in but which I need for my work?
Language, even though many of us might not be aware of it, changes at an astonishing speed. Not so much grammatically or phonetically, but definitely in terms of words and expressions used, new cultural references, new trends.
German, for example, has shown a very distinct trend toward using English words in many fields, so much so that German native translators that do not live in Germany tend to “overuse” German and translate “too much.”

So, for all of us, who need to keep up-to-date on our German – here a set of links to keep a least a little bit up-to-date with what’s going on in Germany and with the German language:
TV and TV news:
www.ard.de
www.tagesschau.de
www.zdf.de/
Newspapers:
www.zeit.de
www.nzz.ch
www.faz.de
www.sueddeutsche.de
Movies:
Netflix
Netflix streams quite a few movies in German and they generally have quite a few movies one can order. It’s not an exhaustive selection, but it’s better than nothing.
Radio:
Check for your favorite radio stations on the internet. Nowadays, most of them have an internet streaming option.
My favorite: www.berlinerrundfunk.de – It might not be the coolest radio station in the world, but it covers the region where I am from and has enough talking among the music that I get a sense of “normal spoken German.”

Generally, the internet is a great resource. It definitely helps in the “upkeep” of one’s language skills.