Months and months ago, the gang from Rosetta Stone tapped me to blog about my constant, middle-age, struggle with learning German.
I had already been — and still am — a Rosetta Stone member, from their original online offering through to their new TOTALe product. Well, my first post debuted last week (I missed seeing it) on their Language Journey blog and here it is: Failing with Language Classes:
I have been struggling with learning German for years in spite of lots of classes both in Washington, DC, as well as in Berlin, Germany, a city I moved to over Halloween 2007 through Christmas 2008. While I know a lot about the German language I still don’t feel comfortable as a German speaker.
On this blog I will share what I have learned about learning German and what I find works for me. As I move forward over the next several months, I hope to get you as excited as I am about learning German.
My best friend Mark lives in Berlin. He has been fluent in German since he was 17. While he maintains an entire life speaking German in Berlin, I had never really been interested in participating, it just seemed too difficult. However, the moment Mark and I started a business together, that all changed. I decided to move to Berlin so that we could spend more time working together on our fledgling company. So, before leaving my Washington, DC apartment behind I signed up for a German course at a language school.
I ended up taking two courses and spent a happy three hours there every Saturday for eighteen weeks. I didn’t learn much German at all. One of the problems was that all the students spoke English, so speaking German was not necessary. Another problem was that I never completed the assigned workbook and CD homework for the week. I blamed it on my crushing work load as an entrepreneur but the truth is that I didn’t enjoy sharpening pencils and pressing them into newsprint workbooks. I always found better things to do. It turned into a downward spiral – I never came prepared for my class because I didn’t enjoy the learning style, so I slowly began to become less and less motivated with getting up and schlepping myself downtown every Saturday morning. Unprepared and full of anxiety and trepidation I headed off to Berlin.
There’s another one that’s up there — the next in the series — Learning German – Round 2 — which I will post in another post!
