This blog will be about................
This seems to be the way every first blog post on a new blog starts so I don't want to break with this tradition.
What will this blog be about?!?
It will be about joy and about frustration. It will be about passion and about abandonment. It will be about fascination and about giving up.
But first of all it will be simply about me and learning languages.
So to keep you reading I have to share a bit about me and why you should read about me when I get mad on the languages I learn.
I'm a student of mathematic and arts and will become a teacher after university. I was born in Germany and lived here my whole life until now. So I'm a German native speaker. Because both of my parents are German native speakers I wasn't introduced to another language until I joined the fourth class at school. As most German native speakers my first foreign language was English. AND I didn't like it right from the start. We were given new 'English' names by our teascher. Because I was already quite a rational person as child I didn't get this whole thing of getting a new name. I already had name. So why the hack should I get new one? And the name given to me was 'Debbie' which quite much remembered me of the German word 'Depp' - what means idiot. Sorry, no insault to all the Debbies out there but that's how it sounds for us back here in Germany. I got it. My classmates got it. So from that moment on I was the Depp of the English classes.
So the years went on. Me and English didn't get any closer. Than in class seven the magic moment in German eductaion system of choosing your second foreigen language came. For me it was either French or Latin. French, the languages that doesn't pronounce all the letters written, didn't seem to be the right way. Especially for me being dyslexic it seemed impossible. So I went with Latin. I can't tell anymore what was more obstructive for learning Latin - me, Latin or my first Latin teacher, who has always put her head in her handbag when the class was getting louder.
This seems to be the way every first blog post on a new blog starts so I don't want to break with this tradition.
What will this blog be about?!?
It will be about joy and about frustration. It will be about passion and about abandonment. It will be about fascination and about giving up.
But first of all it will be simply about me and learning languages.
So to keep you reading I have to share a bit about me and why you should read about me when I get mad on the languages I learn.
I'm a student of mathematic and arts and will become a teacher after university. I was born in Germany and lived here my whole life until now. So I'm a German native speaker. Because both of my parents are German native speakers I wasn't introduced to another language until I joined the fourth class at school. As most German native speakers my first foreign language was English. AND I didn't like it right from the start. We were given new 'English' names by our teascher. Because I was already quite a rational person as child I didn't get this whole thing of getting a new name. I already had name. So why the hack should I get new one? And the name given to me was 'Debbie' which quite much remembered me of the German word 'Depp' - what means idiot. Sorry, no insault to all the Debbies out there but that's how it sounds for us back here in Germany. I got it. My classmates got it. So from that moment on I was the Depp of the English classes.
So the years went on. Me and English didn't get any closer. Than in class seven the magic moment in German eductaion system of choosing your second foreigen language came. For me it was either French or Latin. French, the languages that doesn't pronounce all the letters written, didn't seem to be the right way. Especially for me being dyslexic it seemed impossible. So I went with Latin. I can't tell anymore what was more obstructive for learning Latin - me, Latin or my first Latin teacher, who has always put her head in her handbag when the class was getting louder.
As you can maybe guess my thirteen years of school passed by and I was sucking in all my language classes. Not just in my two foreigen languages - even in my mothertongue I failed badly. I tried to get away with this lame excuse of being more a mathematic natur science kind of geeky person so there was no way to be good at languages because you just can be either or. In my final exame in Englisch I got five out of fifteen points which was just enough to not fail in my degree.
Do you get by now why you should read this blog? No? You think I hate to learn languages and am the biggest looser in it?
I can understand where you might have gotten this impression from but let me tell you it's false. I LOVE to learn laguages. By now I took classes in or selftought me around nine languages. Okay, I forgot most of what I learned due to not having a speeking partner or simply lazyness. But I will come back to this point later.
So how did I get from failing badly in language classes to someone who loves learning new ones?
I fall in love with Mangas. You know these comic books from Japan which were a big thing for everyone who was in his or her teenage years in the early 2000's. My first not Manga but Anime was Sailor Moon. Followed by so many that I can't recall all the names. Somehow my wired mind came from just consuming this little part of Japanese culture to questioning what was the whole picture behind these Mangas. So I got myself into some kind of Japan mania. At one point I decided to give learning a language another shot. I went to the closest Far east asian languages institute and registerd myself for Japanese classes.
And this was the moment when it clicked for the first time. I suddendly found joy in learning this language and I was not failing. I was the best student in my class. First I thought it was just because it was Japanese and I had the right mindset for it because I was addicted with Japan anyway. But when I shortly afterwards went to the university and there wasn't any Japanese class, I joind the Chinese class. I thought - okay, it's not Japanese but it's an ASIAN languages. I will be happy with it. And I became happy with it. Again I was the best student in my class. Learning a language suddenly became easy for me. Joyful. Satisfying.
The Chinese classes were more challinging to me than my regualer univeristy courses. Which quite quickly started to bore me because of their general character. They simply didn't teach me what I thought I needed to become a good teacher - but this is a story for another blog. So to fight my boredom I took the course register and simply took a class in every language (okay, I continued to ignore French) offered to me - Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Swahili and Arab and a summer course in Spanish.
At that time I also joined the mentoring program for incoming exchange students. Because of my Asia mania I was pushing into being a mentor for incoming students from Asian countries. That brought me in touch with a bunch of freaky, funny Korean girls who were more than happy to teach me some Korean for help with their German.
The second key moment was when I finished my Bachelor degree and moved to another city to start my Master studies. Suddenly I found myself in students dorm that was to 80% populated with incoming exchange students who didn't or just barely were able to speak German. I didn't speak a word of English since I left school. All the exchange students I met back at my old university did study German at there home univeristies. I couldn't even asked for a vacuum cleaner - because I didn't know the word 'vacuum cleaner'! The goal of the English classes at German schools is not to enable you to communicate in Englisch. It is to be able to interpret a classic English poem or write an essay about women rights during the English occupation of India. So I had to start from scratch.
I remember an evening when I was sitting in the kitchen with my flatmates talking about eating culture and diet trends in our home countries. For about twenty minutes I was telling everyone about this typical German rubbish diet we tend to do in fall and which allows us to eat only rubbish soup for about two weeks or so. I was proud of myself that I was even able to explain the recipe. After I finished one of flatemates asked me quite confused, what I meant by eating rubbish. I meant the vegetable rubbish. He replied that there isn't a vegetable called rubbish. Rubbish is what you through away. For a moment I was really confused until suddenly realized that I mixed the word 'rubbish' with the word 'cabbage'.
Sadly this new importance for an improvement in English forced me to stop studing the other languages. This led to an oblivion of most of the things I learned... Which leads to this blog.
I started to selfteach me Turkish some time ago and right now I reached this point in learning a languages where you think you should have learned enough to start communicating and you realise you didn't. Also I'm planning on restarting Chinese and I found a cute friend from Spain who offered me to refresh my Spanish skills for help with improving her German conversartion skills.
So in this blog I want to share with you all the little, funny, frustrating, exciting things I come along on the journey to learn my languages. You will understand why I love learning languages as much as I hate it! And I hope I can maybe help little bit with your owns struggles with or even motivate you to start learning a new language. Because every language you learn opens this amazing world a little bit more!
Love Anu
Private Note: Yes, I know my English is still far away from being perfect, but I decided to write in English because so I'm able to reach more of you than in German! So please forgive me my mistakes and my Germanization of the sentence structure.
