Learning new languages

Freiburg, Germany

I’m a native English speaker.  My ancestors came from Germany and the Netherlands (as well as Ireland, Britain, and farther northern Europe) a long time ago — the history I know goes back to 1848, when my great-great grandmother emigrated to America from Germany with her sons, avoiding the Kaiser’s army.

They settled in Ellinwood, Kansas, with the sons establishing a clothing store.

My grandfather spoke some German, enough to speak to German prisoners of war in Northern California, on USO visits.  But I don’t think he was fluent.

I started learning German in 6th grade.  Hmm.  I had a wonderful young teacher who took us on field trips to nearby German-founded communities near Austin.  I have a passable aptitude for languages, but totally am not gifted at learning them.  I continued German through high school and then lived in a college cooperative at UT Austin called German House, where we spoke German at meals (totally intimidating), but I tried (among fellow students who were German and Linguistics majors) -- I was a Liberal Arts Honors major, with a focus on Biology.

I’d placed out of my language requirement in college, aside from one semester, since I’d had plenty of German in high school..

In graduate school, ditto, I had the language requirement completed, but when I received a fellowship to go to Germany as a post-doc, well, I took another semester class before leaving — thankfully, I had a delightful native German-speaking teacher.

My fellowship program, DAAD, sent all of us fellowship holders to 2 months of language school in Freiburg, Germany before we headed off to our post-docs and studies in labs all over Germany. The diversity of my counterparts was impressive — they were from all over the world.

When I arrived at my university lab in Osnabruck, where my fellowship was based, my living quarters were in a university dorm, pleasant enough, but quite simple.

My lab group had morning and afternoon coffee/tea time, when they ate dark rye vollkornbrot sandwiches (wrapped in waxed paper, impressively ecological, I thought at the time).  I always spoke German with my lab group, thinking I was pretty limited, but when my boyfriend, now my hubbie of over 35 years, came to visit, well, they all spoke great English.  So maybe I wasn’t so bad.

Returning to Germany on a garden visiting trip, some 35+ years later, I realized that my German-speaking skills (after quite a bit of refreshing), had been better than I’d thought at the time.

When we were traveling to Spanish-speaking countries, for a decade and half in the early 2000’s, we took college-level Spanish for a couple of semesters.  That was hard work.  As auditors (and faculty members), we hardly wanted to look unprepared!  It was totally helpful, however, as we continued to visit Central and South America.

Now, having quite serendipitously, acquired a house we love in Quebec, in a region that we love, too, we’re trying to learn French as fast as we can.

It’s a good thing to try to understand a place you are, in the moment, through the language that’s spoken there.  We’re getting better, but are still far from conversational.   But we’re getting there. Our understanding of French is SO much better than it was a year and a half ago.