Learning German (Over 10 Years)
People always tell me that I’m good at languages.
It’s never posed as a question, which I suppose is flattering. But it makes my blood boil. You are good at languages so you can learn them, I’m not so I can’t. That is what they are actually saying.
Then I shred their illusion like claws through a sheet when I say it took me ten years to be this comfortable in German.
Like most skills, people see the end result and think you have some inclination for it, painters have always been able to paint, fighters have always been able to fight. I would argue that it comes down to love and dedication. The experts have put more hours into their skills than you because they enjoyed it so much and then they saw the results and fell even more in love with it.
Or in my case with German, a youthful ignorance of the fact that it’s ok to fail and give up. There were many times I felt like I was dragging my dying body toward the finish line of the marathon just repeating, “I’m not a quitter”.
That mentality would have a completely expected and profound effect on my mental health in the coming years, but in high-school it was an asset. In moderation, it is an asset.
Feel free to skip the next section if you are just curious about my study methods and don’t need to hear my life’s story.
THE BEGINNING
I began my German speaking journey by completely disregarding the language for three years. My other classes were more difficult and I had German I first thing in the morning.
And I was twelve. Forgive me.
I usually spent the time studying for other exams because I had learned the numbers and the alphabet in the first week and yet we took a whole month on it for some reason. I continued this trend for the entire year. When I got to German II I remember having a new teacher and the first thing she did was say “Steht auf”. Everyone from her class the year before stood up. Everyone from the other teacher’s class fumbled with their books and followed them two seconds too slow. This would be a crash course for me.
The only problem was she was mean.
So instead of knowing my German was bad and working to fix it, I didn’t want to. I was used to teachers liking me so I would work extra hard to make them proud. This one didn’t not like me, she simply was the teacher that wouldn’t let you use the bathroom unless you asked “May I use the bathroom?” But worse than that, she seemed to take pleasure as she waited for you to work it out yourself, almost delighting in the stress it caused as you struggled to remember proper grammar while fighting to not wet yourself. Safe to say I didn’t care for her much.
I learned a decent amount of German but there was no way I was studying it outside class. I would be damned if I had to be reminded of that woman at any other point in my life besides when I actually had to look at her. I almost didn’t take German III because it would have been with her at the highschool.
Then she got pregnant and went on maternity leave over the summer.
We got a “temporary” teacher for German III. I say that in quotes because he would end up staying several years after I graduated. The other teacher decided to be a full-time mom instead of coming back to be a teacher.
I'm glad she decided to stick to her strengths.
Honestly, I’d love to say this was the catalyst and that I was inspired by this new teacher to put in the effort and ended up becoming the top of my class, but it wasn’t like that. I enjoyed the class a lot more, but I still used it as a rest period for my day. I paid attention, but I was doing World History AP at the time and it was killing me. German class was for sitting back and listening and maybe answering a question of two.
German IV came and went and I still treated it like it was work. I tried in class, but after I finished my homework, I never thought of it once. I never idly thought of the cool grammar changes nor the interesting vocabulary that you can’t really translate. I was happy to just keep the status quo and slowly let German fade into nothing.
Then in spring, the exchange students came.
It was very cool, I loved talking to them in English and that’s what they wanted and the entire reason they came. They wanted to practice their English and see America. I was more than happy to talk to them and learn about what normal for them was and how they viewed us. At the end of the day, during our free period, my teacher set up a language circle with three of the exchange students so us German students could practice our German.
What followed was the single most cringeworthy, embarrassing moment in my entire young life.
Not only could I barely understand the questions, I couldn’t even say what my name was. I had the same skills in German as someone who walked past the class semi regularly. To be fair, the German V kids struggled and looking back now, it is a completely normal thing to happen. Understanding without a lot of exposure is impossible and doubly so when you are speaking with natives. I should have expected nothing less. Knowing grammar and actually using grammar are two different skills.
Though I was embarrassed, one thing stood out to me and saved me. I finally saw the point.
Intellectually, I knew that German was spoken by people, but those people were very far away and I really had no physical proof. Now it was sitting in front of me, slowly blinking as I struggled through “Ich bin Alex”.
I put in more effort after that meeting. I remembered what I wanted to say and looked it up and memorized it for next time, then next time hit and a completely different conversation happened so all my preparation was for nothing.
The school year ended but I never forgot that feeling of sitting in that circle. I had to step up my game.
THE GAMEPLAN
This was long before I even knew what Anki was, long before I realized that Youtube has hundreds of videos to listen to (although my phone didn’t have enough data to even do that). I didn’t know about comprehensive listening, nor even that I was supposed to differentiate input and output.
At some point in my life, I noticed that I was very good at memorizing lyrics to songs. I have since dug deeper into the mechanics of this and found that it was more that I listened to the same songs on repeat and sung them when I wasn’t actively listening to them. The process of getting the words then having to repeat memorized words without any input is basically like flash cards and spaced repetition if you think of it a certain way.
Either way, I dedicated myself to this. There was no second guessing if this was the right way, or the most efficient way, it was full steam ahead until German V was over. So every morning, I would put in my headphones on the 20 minute bus ride to school and I would listen to a spotify playlist of exactly fifteen German songs. I had screenshots of the lyrics on my phone so I would read along and try not to fall behind. It wasn’t easy, but it was low stakes. I was half-asleep and wouldn’t get mad or frustrated when it didn’t work. I also didn’t have spotify premium so I couldn’t rewind a song, nor choose what song I was listening to that day.
It was a lot of CRO, Helene Fischer, and SDP.
This was a good mix because Helene Fisher is very slow and not complicated, but also not really something I want to listen to. CRO is faster and good, but hard to understand. SDP is one of my favorites even if most of the songs they make are ridiculous and don’t include phrases I would ever see myself using. I don’t need “in meinem Keller liegt ‘ne Leiche” (in my basement is a body) even if it's a catchy song.
I’m putting this in bold for a reason: If you want to learn how to speak like a native, memorize and sing songs.
Have you ever heard another language speaker sing in English? They don’t have an accent. It is insane that they can go from an identifiable German accent to nothing just by singing a song they like. Think about it, do British people sound British when they sing American songs? They do not. Something about matching the tone, pitch, and cadence wipes the accent clean. So if you want to sound like a native, sing native songs.
I hated hearing people butcher German, so learning to sound the part was definitely an area I dedicated a lot of time to. I pride myself in having a good German accent when speaking.
I also started to memorize phrases, but not phrases that were important from a grammar and meaning standpoint, phrases that were more about comfortably expressing where I was at. Phrases like: “Hmmm, that’s interesting”, “oh are you sure”, “oh yeah I heard that”, and “no, I’m not saying that”. I memorized these ones with as much slang as I could because my goal wasn’t to describe minute details, it was to keep the conversation flowing.
I wanted speaking with a German to be as comfortable for them as possible because they had a tendency to switch to English if there was an awkward pause of misunderstanding. I would not allow them to rob me of my input.
In addition to songs, I had German class where we were down to ten people out of the 1100 that graduated that year. I was fortunate that I was past the point of embarrassment because despite hours and hours of dedication, I was in the bottom third for ability.
My listening skill was coming along well, though I will admit the teacher talked slowly and clearly. I had a huge mental block with speaking, as we all do when learning languages. It is scary and embarrassing to be reduced to the skill of a toddler learning for the first time. Especially in front of native speakers. I was always so worried I would misunderstand or that I would say the wrong thing and then it would be awkward.
If I could give myself one piece of advice from the future it would be this: Do it, own it, f**k it, who cares.
I remember presenting several projects, spending the whole morning going over what I wanted to say, then being so nervous in the moment that I couldn’t get any of it out. I would stumble over several lines then leave without saying a tenth of what I wanted.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should have spoken slower. I wanted it to sound natural, but that’s the second thing you should be worried about. The first is that you actually say it. Who cares if you sound good.
Another thing is that I shouldn’t have been worried about my grammar not being perfect. I would hear a question in German that I understood, then not raise my hand to answer it because maybe my response was not grammatically perfect. Again, it would have been much better to get my point across than to worry that some professor would come down from on high with an “Actually…” while adjusting his glasses.
Do it, who cares.
Ironically, of the people that were left in the class, the ones that didn’t really care were the best speakers. It’s ironic because I doubt they speak any German at all now. But those that were too worried about looking stupid and being embarrassed also let it fade to nothing after highschool.
I think you need to care a lot without being bogged down by your failures. To be dedicated and put the time in even when there is no immediate reward. It is a rare mindset to have and coupled with the lack of proximity most Americans have to other languages, it is unsurprising that many do not become bilingual. No shame here, it is the hardest thing I have ever done.
Anyway, I would have been locked in this cycle of putting a whole sentence together in my head then not saying it had my mom not found out about the exchange program where we would go to Germany for half a month. I hadn’t told her about it because it was almost $2000 and I didn’t want to put a financial burden on my parents like that. She heard about it and told me I was going.
So I was going.
THE TRIP
Me and a group of other German students, along with our teacher, landed in Germany and took a train to the town we would be staying. At this point we had been up for about 28 hours and people were through their second wind. I couldn’t sleep though, I was too excited to see the countryside and the people.
It should have been no surprise to me, but every little thing was in German from the cans of soda to the tickets for the train. I knew intellectually that that was the case, but it is a whole other feeling to see it and hear that all the small talk is also in German. This is the meaning of immersion. Then it was time to meet my host family.
I credit Jet-lag for what happened next. One second I was holding “Es ist schoen euch kennenzulernen” (it is nice to meet you) trying to figure out if euch is accusative or dative and if that mattered, the next I was rambling about a bunch of random stuff. It was like the walls that were holding me back fell down and I was finally free. It is a feeling that I will remember forever. As bad as the embarrassment of failure is and as many times as I felt it over the years, it was all worth it for that moment. To see the family exchange glances with each other with naked wonder on their faces. To hear them say, “wow, er is fast perfekt” (he is almost perfect).
Bliss.
Oddly, my speaking regressed as I stayed mostly due to exhaustion. I think I may have slept five hours a night total because if I was going to be in Germany, I was going to be awake for most of it. Either way, I had broken down a huge barrier and could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I would love to say that I lived happily ever after and was fluent from that point, but the hurdle of fear and embarrassment would appear over and over again. I took German as a minor in college and enjoyed it, but every time I was confronted with a native speaker I would get tongue tied and lose my ability to speak well. I lived in Germany for six months and still struggled for various reasons. Immersion can lead to drowning and it is unsurprising why so many grab hold of anything familiar to avoid part of themselves being washed away.
It wasn’t until I was speaking German with a friend of mine when I finally pushed off the shackles of perfection that had been holding me down. It turns out the problem was personal, not language related at all.
You see, for a lot of my life with strangers and people I want to make a good impression on, I am not myself. I put forward my best qualities and bury the tiredness, the exasperation. I ignore what my body is telling me and try to be the person that they need, to put on a front of strength for them. Not to say it's not me, I just wouldn’t allow myself to be seen as anything other than perfect.
When I spoke German, I would amp up and try to be interesting and engaging, which would result in people having a great time, but I couldn’t keep it up. It was exhausting. And since it was exhausting, it was easier to avoid the situation altogether. I would rather be alone than have to put on a front.
Well that situation eventually spiraled out of control in all aspects of my life and when I went to pick up the pieces, I had no energy to do that anymore. What people saw was what I actually felt.
But weirdly, the response was the same as normal. No one really noticed.
I thought I had to be the best, turns out they would have been just as happy with the real me, tiredness and all. I had the “don’t worry about what others think” down, I just never got to the “just be me” part of it.
But speaking to my friend in German was easy. I didn’t really have to worry because he was about as good as I was and when we made a mistake we either laughed or just waved it off and continued. I didn’t really care if he thought my German was bad and it had the opposite effect of making my German better. But not better in the context of high energy having a good day, better in the context of having a beer and shooting the shit. I didn’t have to be “on” when speaking German anymore.
Now, I can go long stretches without speaking any German and have no issues retaining what I know. I credit this to having memorized a lot of songs and honestly just working so hard at it for so long. If it took me about ten years to be comfortably fluent with natives at the drop of a hat, it would likely take me ten years of not thinking about it once to forget it.
As long as I listen to some music every now and then and maybe watch a video, I will always be able to have a conversation.
I do not purport to be this expert on all things German, but I learned enough to let my personality show through, to meet people with a grin and chat about whatever they want to talk about. My basics are solid as a rock so leaning into the more complex topics is just a question of time and inclination. I couldn’t be an engineer at the moment in Germany, nor could I talk politics, but I could listen, ask questions, and joke around about it.
And after all, what more could I want.
