This Rosetta Stone Language Journeys blog post, Learning German – Round 2, is a continuation of a previous post, part one, Failing with Language Classes, and deals with my General tendency to dance around learning something hard by obsessing about it, learning about it, and buying lots and lots of books and texts and stories and dictionaries instead of actually becoming a true bouncing baby German-speaker — collecting German instead of learning German:
I arrived in Berlin, terrified of sounding like a toddler and a moron while trying to speak German. So, I just didn’t — I spoke English. After a while in Berlin, I signed up for another language course, again starting at the beginning. This time it was serious: three hours a day, five days a week, for four months.
I was pretty religious with attendance and the course was completely immersive based on necessity, not just as a learning strategy — English was not the lingua franca of this school. I had classmates who were from Iran, Yemen, Turkey, China, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Brazil.
Again, my story was a sob story. The moment I left class, I didn’t prioritize the hours of homework, the mandated flash cards, the rote memorization of verb conjugations and noun gender — I had a business to run and I had a social life — with Berliners who were happy to practice their flawless English.
Eventually, I realized I had been fetishing German learning more than I have been trying to learn German. After three years of German language grazing, I have half-a-dozen German-English dictionaries, another four packs of German vocabulary flash cards, and an assortment of German workbooks, verb books, grammar books and the whole lot. It was almost like I got confused — I was collecting German instead of learning German — like buying classical CDs instead of learning how to play the viola.
