Sprichst du Deutsch??

The Language.

This is going off a train of thought I had from the last blog. Because I spoke so much German and only German yesterday at my concert day, today I’ve been thinking a lot about learning a language, and being in a country of a different language. Let me try and explain what its like for me on a day to day basis. This is an example of where I began to where I’m at right now….

Stage 1
(the first month I was here)
Pretend you can’t speak. ….yes that is basically the way it was.

(and yes, I know that that’s a bit exaggerated but sometimes its exactly how I feel, I can’t say what I want to say, its like being tongue tied. And also, yes, they understand English, but I always try to speak German first cause I think its more respectful……if I just spoke English it would be like a person coming to Canada from France and only speaking French to you because he just assumed because we learn French in school, that you could understand it perfectly)

SO, pretend you can’t speak. Think about how you would try and express yourself through your actions, your facial expressions etc……think about how much you would just want to say what your thinking…..but are unable.

Stage 2
Next, pretend you can only say every other word in a sentence.
So if you were talking, people could probably guess at what your trying to say…..but they never actually understand you completely.

Stage 3
And this is kinda where I’m at right now. Pretend you could think of 70% of the words that you wanted to say (which is great!) but half of them are in the wrong tense lol. For example lots of my sentences probably sound like this (and this was really hard to come up with a grammatically bad English sentence cause when you know a language, the best part is you DON’T have to think about every word and tense, it just flows)

“Play he more but one instrument?”

Which would mean—“Does he play more then one instrument?”

I have a feeling that that is the way I sound to my German friends quite often. To cut myself some slack, German is a HARD! Language! They all say English is so easy to learn cause you don’t have, male, female and neutered nouns, plus a million other crazy grammatical things.

I like talking German in my head WAY better then out loud cause I can make it flow better. The sounds and the way the words feel in your mouth are different too which makes speaking slow. Every time I think I’m getting better, I say something stupid or am unable to say something at all and I think, when will I finally get a handle on this?!

The greatest test will be when I head back to my relatives for Christmas, cause I havn’t seen them much since my first couple days that I was in Germany and I hope they will see a big improvement!

Ok bis bald! Habt ihr einen ganz guten Tag!!