On the Road with Julie

Germany is the first place I’ve visited so far where I’ve been deeply linguistically intimidated. I expected that would be the case as it would be my first country where my grasp of the language is elementary, at best. This is a “not-ready-for-prime-time” situation.

I purposefully chose Berlin as my first stop for a few days of rest after 7 weeks of constant travel and language lessons. I had heard that, for better or worse, in addition to being a city rich with history that I was very much looking forward to exploring, Berlin is a city that you can get around pretty easily as an English speaker. So I figured it would be a good point of entry into my German-learning journey, where I could turn the heat up gradually on the language pressure cooker.

Even though that was the point, still, it pained me when I got in the cab from the airport and had to start with the words, “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” Well, “sprach” he did, so “Englisch” we spoke. Despite my love and affection for my native language, it was physically painful for me to spend my first hours in Germany having a conversation in English. My insides craved a back and forth in this new linguistic playground, even though I don’t actually contain the German within me with which to do it.

It is possible that if I stopped being such a sissy about the whole thing, I could have started the trip with a painfully slow German conversation and just mangled my way through it. As a matter of fact, in most situations, that is usually what I would do. There is enough German floating around inside of my brain to stitch together a laborious, but fully German back and forth. The driver was a nice man, and I bet he would have entertained my efforts. But, alas, I chickened out. I didn’t even try. This is not particularly like me. Actually, I’ve never experienced this before. I am typically linguistically bold – always leaning towards public humiliation just for the chance to utter a few words in another tongue, but, I settled into the long (and expensive!) cab ride to my AirBnB surrendering and embracing the fact that my brain was asking for one moment to not be thrown into a constant lingual contortion and just enjoy a soft landing pad for once. I acquiesced and showed my tired neurons a touch of (temporary) mercy. This is not my style, but I do recognize when rest is needed, so I muzzled my internal and incessant linguistic eagerness and enjoyed a mostly quiet ride with sporadic bursts of English conversation after a long day of travel.

The next day, I was committed to resting the entire day – something, at this point in the journey, I was definitely hungry for. I spent the day laying in bed, watching German language videos, getting my brain warmed up for 5.5 weeks of a new language adventure. I scheduled a half hour conversation with a German tutor I had started working with a few weeks before the trip started. She is so wonderfully patient with me. We spoke the whole time in German, but she deserves consideration for some entry-level sainthood for the stamina required in order to converse with me in the language. I imagine a German conversation with me, at present time, is somewhat like trying to take a shower under the drops of water that fall from a recently turned-off faucet. You see the droplet ever so slowly forming, thanks to gravity’s persuasive effects, around the round edges of a once active shower head. With time, enough wetness accumulates into one focused point. And, finally, the process culminates – generating one measly drop. The drop desperately clings to the metal until it succumbs to falling under its own weight and…plop, you got one! And the process begins all over again. That is going to be one long, cold, not-all-that-effective shower. That, my friends, is a conversation with me in German. There is real German dripping out of my mouth, but, there is no thrilling conversational flow forming from the tedious drip-dropping of me finding words.

But, hey – it’s a start!

And, actually, this is part of what I love about language learning. The more intimidating, the more difficult, the more struggle I feel at the beginning, the sweeter the win when, eventually, I somehow start to understand the foreign sounds coming out of someone’s mouth – and even more exciting when I start to make those sounds myself. So, being intimidated and unimpressed by my current level is not a negative for me. Just the opposite. It just makes me that much more excited to see where I’ll be 5 weeks from now.

AND – though my current drip-droppy level might qualify as cruel and unusual punishment were I to subject an unsuspecting German to a conversation with me, for me, this is still a triumph. German is the first language that I started learning 100% through comprehensible input, a method of language learning of which I am a huge fan and an avid proponent. There is plenty to read about comprehensible input online, but, in short, it is a method that mirrors the process by which we all learned our native tongues as babies and toddles and children. You surround yourself by input (reading and listening are two forms of input) that is just within reach of your comprehension and, over time, you will find yourself understanding more and more and, eventually, starting to want to speak it. I always try to get as much comprehensible input as I can in any language, but German is the only language that I have reached any kind of speaking level at (so far) where I’ve ONLY used comprehensible input to get there. And, to be honest, I think, cumulatively, I’ve only spent maybe 40 hours max over the last few years, even doing that. I haven’t spent all that much time or energy learning German at all. So, for me, the fact that I speak or understand any German at all feels like magic. It doesn’t feel like I ever did any studying, even though I have. It feels like it came from nowhere. So, even though I find myself more intimidated to speak German than any other language, especially in a real life setting with native speakers, I actually feel really proud and excited about my German level existing at all.

I’m on the train now, from Berlin to Cologne where a German teacher is awaiting me for a 1 week super intensive, 0% English, 100% German, one-on-one program before I head to Vienna for 4 weeks at a German language school. After checking out of my AirBnb and, calling an uber to the train station, this time, I had a different linguistic experience. After 2 days in Berlin, mostly speaking English, but absorbing the German environment and starting to get my feet wet in German studies, I started to build up a little courage. This time, when my uber came to pick me up for the train station and said, “Guten Morgen”. I said back, “Guten Morgen.” I spoke with him, “ein sehr bisschen”, a very little bit, in German until he started speaking really fast. BUT, rather than say, “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”, I said, “Es tut mir leid, mein Dutch ist nicht sehr gut. Ich verstehe es nicht.” Now, THAT’s an improvement and a major win. Courage is officially building!

Of course, the major linguistic triumph, occurred a moment later when he responded to my basic German apology with a simple, one-word question,

“Français?”

Mais, bien sûr!

If I didn’t speak French, we wouldn’t have been able to communicate much at all, because he didn’t speak English, “only” German, French and Macedonian. This is the kind of freedom I love to experience thanks to an ever deepening linguistic coffer.

Spending the rest of the ride to the train station speaking in French was a celebration of the successes already achieved and a fantastic boost of encouragement to put the time and the effort into German, knowing that, as with all things, with a little good ole fashion elbow grease and, “mit der Zeit, werde ich mich verbessern”.