- Image via CrunchBase
The gang at Rosetta Stone have invited me to blog for them about my experience and struggles learning German. Two posts are already in the can and I am on my way to the third, forth, and fifth. I have many opinions on language leaning and quite a few anecdotes: living in Berlin; traveling Europe; trying to speak and faking it; diving in to the immersive experience of TOTALe with its coaches and games and online community; and listening, reading, watching, thinking, and hopefully dreaming some time soon in German, a language oh so hard to me. Well, anyway, my contacts at Rosetta Stone asked me if I would write a bio for the site. Well, I could have given them my official executive bio; instead, I wrote this bugger up for them. It is a little long and this is the first draft but here’s my Rosetta Stone Blog Bio:
Chris Abraham has been struggling with languages since he struggled with Latin in seventh and eighth grade at Catholic boys school in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he grew up. Later, in high school, Chris struggled with Spanish. It wasn’t until college, when studying intensive French, that Chris made some language breakthroughs. Happily, Chris succeeded in learning quite a bit of French and excelled in faking a pretty good French accent, which, he learned, serves very well. Affecting a culturally insensitive accent while speaking French, sort of a mixture of Inspector Clouseau and honking geese, really worked for him and he received very many compliments. Sadly, moving to Paris was not in the cards, nor was any semblance of expatriation. Then, 15-years later, 2006, Chris started a social media marketing agency, Abraham Harrison, and partnered with Mark Harrison, a resident of Berlin, Germany. This venture suddenly rekindled Chris’ dormant dreams of expatriation and jet-set. Chris moved to Berlin on Halloween, 2007. Moved moved.
Unfortunately, there’s very little French spoken in Berlin; sadly, German was very hard for Chris. He had tried taking classes in Washington, DC, where he had lived and currently lives when he’s not bicycling around Berlin on a single speed bike. He tried taking intensive classes in Berlin, riding his single speed bike every day to class, 5-days-a-week. Chris bought all the books, tried to shoe-horn himself into the The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, but he just wouldn’t put the work in — he was running a burgeoning company; plus, all of his super-cool, hipster, expat friends spoke English and even his arty, creative, German friends were more than happy to indulge him in English. All of these classes with their traditional methods, systems, and homework in pencil in workbooks just frustrated Chris way more than challenged him.
Chris was frustrated and crestfallen, though not defeated and then assaulted the problem head on. This series of blog posts is the culmination of all of the attention, obsession, and passion that Chris has invested into learning a new language — learning German — on the edge of forty. A lot of it was and is with the help of Rosetta Stone TOTALe but some of it is just the result of trying to extend my immersion in German language and culture well past the hours he is able to actually clamp on a pair of headset headphones and plug into Rosetta Stone: German-language movies, podcasts, radio shows, television, online videos, paper flash cards, visual dictionaries, pop culture sites, online newspapers — the whole gambit of ways Chris can easily use to spot check and reactivate the dim-but-passionate part of his brain that really and desperately wants to learn German. His goal? Well, Chris wants desperately to be able to attend a dinner party in Berlin with all of his German friends and be a charming conversationalist in German. If Chris could manage that, he would indeed be rather pleased with himself.
