Language acquisition

When I landed in Cologne two and a half weeks ago I could barely speak any German at all. It was a pretty unpleasant surprise. I'd spent most of the summer writing emails in German and taking care of official forms that were all in German, which sort of "woke up" the language in my head again (if that makes sense), so I thought that I'd be reasonably competent when I hit the ground. Turns out the exact opposite was true--I hadn't taken a German course or really spoken it seriously since summer 2009, so most of the progress I'd made and the confidence I used to have pretty much evaporated out of my head.

In this past little while, though, I've really made a ton of progress. I'm learning a lot of new words, and finding that I'm sort of automatically correcting my grammar without thinking about it. Plus a huge part of speaking a foreign language is simply having the confidence to actually do it. If you're nervous and scared of tripping over your words and making mistakes, then that's exactly what's going to happen in a conversation.

I could really see the difference in my speaking confidence between my first week in Hamburg my second week in Hamburg. During the first week I had to "anmelden," which means I had to register my address with the city government. This is the first and easiest of all the little hoops you have to jump through to live and work here, but I was still struggling with the language and was pretty intimidated by the German Bureaucracy Machine, so I really made a much bigger ordeal of it than it actually was. During my second visit a few days ago I applied for my visa, which is a much more complicated and time consuming process. Since I was sort of familiar with how the system works in the Eimsbüttel Bezirksamt, and I had one more week's worth of German under my belt, things went so much better. It's kind of hard to gauge how much progress you're making in language acquisition sometimes, so having those two experiences to compare to each other was very helpful.

I'm finding it really, really surprising how difficult it is to totally, 100% immerse myself in German though. You'd think that when you're living in Germany with a German family and working with Germans and spending the vast majority of your time around Germans that you'd rarely ever use English, but that's really not the case. Anytime I'm writing emails or on the computer everything is in English, almost all Germans speak English, and I'm teaching English in school, so sometimes I kind of have to work to speak German for a majority of the day.

I'm also discovering that I have to stick to one language or another when I'm speaking or even thinking. If I try to switch back and forth between languages too quickly I can't speak either very well--I forget words, form sentences incorrectly, start mixing in German with my English and vice versa, it's just a mess. It affects my writing too. Sometimes when I'm proofreading these blog posts I come across something I wrote and think, "What?! Well....that doesn't make sense at all does it?" I experienced this last summer when I was in Berlin too, but it's still fascinating to see the different ways that being between two languages affects your ability to communicate. It's something so incredibly basic that we never think about it, so it's an incredible eye-opener when the way you communicate changes so drastically--when you start to lose your grasp on your own native tongue. Fascinating stuff for sure.