After four months of dabbling in Korean and Japanese, it is time to put myself to the ultimate language learning test–German, my first foreign language, the one that convinced me I was thick as a brick. A full accounting of my experience to date with the language would fill a library shelf, but I will still try to sketch the highlights below.
Study Experience
I spent much of my early childhood in Germany. I have no basically no memories of the first time we moved there, but I can say with some certainty that I was too busy learning English to also pick up a second language from the wider environment. I was in elementary school the second time we were stationed in Germany, so I was in a good cognitive state to pick up a little of the language. In terms of formal education, the DoD school only had a single weekly class covering bits of Germany history and culture as part of the elementary school curriculum.
Years later in high school when I finally had to take a foreign language, I selected German. I coasted for the first year, then due to various scheduling quirks had my second and third years under self-directed study. This meant, I mostly used German class to do my math homework, and otherwise did the bare minimum to get the credit.
Since then, I’ve occasionally seized on the idea that I want to bring my latent German up to a level of fluency, which has involved various books, websites, and podcasts. Of course, this was interspersed with equivalently sporadic attempts to learn Spanish and Arabic, so I never maintained a consistent study schedule of German for more than a month or two. Despite often meeting Germans while traveling internationally, I’ve always hesitated to speak. It has long been a theory that all I need is an extended immersion in a German environment to push myself. So, either this is going to bear out or I will be facing my self-delusions.
Study Plan
The good news is that I have a wealth of materials to work on while in Germany.
- German: Step by Step. A physical book I picked up 12 years ago at a discount book store. I look forward to finishing a reread so I can trash the book.
- Duolingo. As one of the first languages on the platform, Duolingo has both a long and detailed course for German, as well as a set of audio-visual stories.
- Lingodeer+. As long as I decide to keep paying the monthly fee for this app, I have the three-pronged vocabulary review (written German to English, spoken German to English, English to German), the grammar training, verb conjugation training, and quizzes specializing in prepositions and der/die/das.
- Podcasts: I have a number of podcasts for German long ago downloaded and processed. Two series (Audio Tutor and My Daily Phrase German) are basically just audio-phrase books that I can throw on while taking a nap, while a much better produced progressive series (Warum Nicht) is worth a close relistening. (During one of my graduate work German study spells, I listened to these a lot…to the point that I can recite lines from the dialogs easily). Warum Nicht has accompanying pdf worksheets as well.
- Foreign Service Institute Textbooks. If I’m really getting desperate for linguistic content, I also have digital copies of the textbooks used by the State Department.
- Media. I don’t have much in the movie department, but I guess it is finally time to watch the series “Babylon Berlin.”
The bad news, is that this is almost too much content to plow through if I am only actively studying an hour or two a day. As I only intend to spend about a month in Germany, I’m going to have to limit the tourism and really study hard.