System 13

As I often word it when people ask me how long I’ve been learning German: “I’ve been learning it off and on for quite a few years now.”

In learning German, I think I’ve come to learn how to learn languages – or at least started to learn how. One of the major points I stupidly ignored when I started (and actually for quite a while, up until just recently, actually) was listening. The first foreign language I dabbled in was Latin. It being a dead language, I simply studied it through my Wheelock’s text; I didn’t listen to any CDs of it, or news broadcasted in Latin (but I could have if I’d wanted to). There was a need to be able to sound out the words in my mind as I read along, but I didn’t have to have any real listening ability. When reading texts, I could take my slow, sweet time in translating them. I learned vocabulary by rote memory, along with grammar rules, and then did exercises.

I think that my initial learning strategies for Latin bled off onto learning German when I started learning it a few years ago. I think I came to assume that if I could read and write German, I could automatically listen and speak well, too. How wrong I was! They’re all very different skills. Being able to do one excellently does help the others, sure, but it doesn’t make you good at them. You have to practice them all independently. One of the big eye-openers about this for me was when I started working with a language partner through eTandem. When I first started working with Marcel, my partner, we just did emails. After a while we started chatting some over MSN Messenger. And after a bit longer, we tried some voice communication via Skype. While I generally always had questions about his emails in German, I could figure out what he was trying to convey (usually). The same went for our chats; while I wouldn’t know every word, I could generally get some idea of what he was talking about. And then we tried voice communication, and I suddenly felt like I didn’t know any German at all. He’d fire off a sentence and I’d be left going, “Uhhh.. say what?” When he’d type it out and I could read it, it would sink in: oh, that’s what he was saying!

This was a good indication to me that my ears simply weren’t trained in deciphering German spoken at a normal pace. In spoken conversation, you don’t have time to look at a word repeatedly like you do in a written text, wondering what it means. You don’t have time to study the verb conjugations or the word order. You simply have to be able to listen and understand. If you pause even briefly to try and think something through, the speaker has already said a dozen more words, and you’ve missed a sentence or two. You can quickly fall so far behind in the conversation that you might as well not bother! Since having this realization smack me in the face, I’ve been really been trying to listen more. I figure I’ve neglected listening so long, it might do me some good to really focus in on it for a while. I’ve started a small collection of German podcasts, and I try to listen to a few of them everyday. They’re only 10 to 20 minutes each, but even in such short podcasts, there are huge amounts of words that I still don’t know, so it’s plenty for now. While I’m still far from fluent, after a few weeks of regularly listening to German podcasts, my ears have gotten better at picking out words. Even if I don’t know what the words mean, I can at least tell, audibly, where one word ends and another begins. I’m happy with my progress so far.