A. and I have been in German classes for about 3 weeks, 5 hours a week, and I have to admit, I'm amazed at how much progress you can make in a new language in that short amount of time. Particularly when your attention is as divided as mine has been.
We have a great teacher who mixes up our activities to give us a variety of ways to speak and hear German. She's actually Swiss, so we're learning German from a Swiss-German speaker.
The obvious bonus is that there are so many opportunities outside of class to practice what you just learned: going to the grocery, to a cafe, meeting German speakers who work with you or attend classes on campus. It's extremely rewarding, after the frustration you experience in a challenging class, to successfully remember and use a new word or grammatical principle just a few hours later.
The other setting I practice in is the most fun. It's the free English classes on Thursday nights. I don't teach, but I arrive after the hour-long lesson for the 45-minute fellowship in which the students get to practice their English in an informal setting. There are only three English teachers and there are about 20 students, so I just go to meet people and to give them another person to talk with.
Tonight I met three women who are new to the class, so they just have a handful of English words and phrases they can use. Two of them are from Italy; the third one is Swiss but married an Italian man. Two of them speak fluent Spanish, for some reason that wasn't clear to me. But because my German is so limited (although I was surprised at how much I got to use tonight to further the conversation), I would switch to Spanish, because that was the language in which we had the most vocabulary in common.
It was astonishing to walk away tonight and realize I held a lengthy conversation in three different languages. Wow. I have for so long wanted to improve my Spanish and learn a third language. I can't believe it's finally happening. It's also been so long since I learned Spanish (three years in high school) that I had not remembered the wonder that comes with the transition from looking at the words of a foreign language and seeing just nonsense to the moment when you can read whole sentences and instantly translate them in your mind.
I had that moment Tuesday when a friend mentioned one of her favorite German desserts is Heisse Liebe, and I blurted out the translation, "Hot love?"
Attending German classes myself gives me a new understanding for the way the English students trip and stumble over English on Thursday nights. They have a lot of hesitance and embarrassment at being so limited, and now I know how they feel.
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