My Journey Through Learning German — The 6-Month Checkpoint

Like many scholars, I used to study a language. German was mine, and I was bad. Really bad. I kept getting the equivalent of Ds and Es all throughout my secondary and high school.

Although I had the chance to visit a few cities as a teenager (Mainz, Heidelberg, Dresden, Frankfurt), I struggled so much speaking German that I gave up. I was convinced that I wasn’t made to learn languages, but since that I learned English meanwhile, I gave it another go 6 months ago, around my 26th birthday.

I tried new ways of learning, like Duolingo and Memrise (they are both free), but as well watching movies in German that I already saw like The Intouchables, The Lion King, Heartbreaker and even Zootropolis lately.

Last weekend, I visited Vienna and could finally put my learning in practice. And I got to say: it seems to work. I’m not yet satisfied of my level of understanding, even less by my speaking skills, but I now manage to be understood and discuss some basic things about life. It’s challenging, I feel ridiculous, but I try my best and I love this.

I somehow learned English on the go via video games, YouTube early vloggers in 2008 and travels, but never consciously learned it to an advanced level: I was forced to already start with strong basics, being already surrounded by it.

Learning a new language now feels exciting, because I’m setting myself up for a failure every day, and trying to speak in German as soon as I meet a German speaker (thanks Dublin for its diversity).

The best decision I’ve lately made is to set up my phone settings in German, as I’m using it every single day. I did not expected this but somehow, my phone set up all the applications in German too, making it a huge struggle at the beginning to find some basic applications, as for instance “Calendar” is now “Kalender” or “Calculator” is now “Rechner”. But I got used to it!

It forced me to surround myself even more with German, everything social-related being now notified to me in German. If you’re currently learning a language, I’d highly recommend you to do the same, as you already know your phone by heart in your native language.

I hope to finish the 20 lessons left on the German Duolingo tree and doing the reverse one (German to English). My goal is still to be able to handle a full advanced conversation in German in 6 months.

Hope to see you at the 1-year Checkpoint and see how it went!

This article was originally published on my blog www.914am.com.