Just become good friends with a native speaker

I'm dutch speaking so it's pretty easy for me to become close friends with germans. I've never really had a friend that liked to speak german that much, we either speak english or dutch. But I made a new friend, let's call him Bernd and the only thing he will speak is german. He doesn't even know english, so I was forced to finally consistently practice my german. It's crazy how much just speaking german can improve it, way more than anything else.<br><br>Now I understand german almost perfectly and I can have long conversations with no effort. I still make mistakes but I'm getting better at it and the most important thing is that I'm not shy to speak anymore. I can now even read a german book and understand it without much effort. <br><br>From now on I'm just going to speak german and never speak dutch again.