Embarrassed about speaking a foreign language? Get over it.

So, I’ve been learning German now for a few years. Most (read: almost all) of my learning has been reading / writing. The main reason for this is that where I live, there aren’t any German speakers. Pretty decent reason, huh?

Well, it used to be, anyway. With the internet and free voice calls, via MSN, Skype, etc., there isn’t really any excuse. Except the fact that I’m extremely shy about speaking, because I have essentially no experience with it whatsoever.

In the past few weeks I’ve been speaking over MSN / Skype with a few German friends of mine. Well, rather, I should say, trying to speak. I’ve found that my tongue doesn’t want to cooperate with my brain like my hands do. I can communicate in written German well enough, but when I try to speak it, it’s quite difficult. The brain gets ahead of the tongue, and the tongue proceeds to go “uhhh, ummm, mmm, shit, I don’t know the words…”

Suffice to say, this is extremely frustrating. It’s not until you’re in the middle of a spoken conversation that you realize just how many everyday words you don’t know. Everytime I talk to them, I’m reminded of just how many everyday words I’m clueless about. I diligently throw them down on a “to look up” list and move on.
Having said that, it’s still really enjoyable. Frustrating as all hell, but still enjoyable. Hopefully the more I do it, the level of frustration will go down and the level of enjoyment will go up.

Oh, and to add a bit of humor to this. Today I was speaking to my friend Kathrin. There was a fly buzzing around me. I wanted to say “Damn flies!” I wasn’t sure of the word for ‘flies’, so I looked it up at dict.cc. I saw Hosenschlitze as one of the translations for fly. Without thinking it over very long, since we were in the middle of a conversation, I yelled, “Verdammte Hosenschlitze!” Kathrin started laughing extremely hard.

She explained it shortly thereafter. I’d just damned every zipper in the world.

D’oh.