Falling Through

Starting another round of language learning.

Language learning is not for the faint-hearted, especially when your five-year-old is fluent and you are not. How I wish learning German was as easy for me as it is for her! She plays all day at KiTa, comes home spouting perfect Deutsch, and can sing, joke, and banter bilingually. As I slog through the first days of my second long stint of German language classes, I can’t help but envy the language built on the playground in a brain that is fully engaged in absorbing it. Textbooks are just so boring, and there comes a point in class when all I can hear running through my own head is a dialtone.

While it takes me considerable effort and a lot of muttering to myself in preparation, for my daughter it’s like flipping a switch. All it takes is one little question in German or a quick quip and she’s off! Meanwhile, I struggle with the vastly different meanings of words that differ by a letter or two--gehen and gesehen, wieder and weiter, eigentlich and endlich. The list goes on and on. I continually mess it up, sometimes multiple ways in the same sentence.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a few German speakers about my language learning process. All of them assure me that people understand what I mean, that it’s not such a big deal to mispronounce things--that everyone gets it. They share this with me in English of course, so I know they understand, at least to some degree. Which, on one hand, I appreciate. It’s a valuable reminder that I’m not actually being evaluated on the nit-picking level of the teachers at the language school. On the other hand, the pain is particularly acute because no one here really learns English as an adult.

When I was in 3rd grade, we had 15 minutes of Spanish a week at my wealthy suburban elementary school. I learned a song about the colors and the months of the year and then foreign language was put on pause until I started again in earnest as a freshman in high school. My son, who is in 3rd grade at a German public elementary school, has four hours of English lessons per week.

For him, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. We laugh about it a lot. He, a fluent novel-reader and a well-versed philosopher and argumentarian at age 8, spends a large chunk of his school time talking about what we call clothing and how to say if it’s too big or too small. I pretend to quiz him on his colors and animals the way I did when he was two. I let him have the easy hours at school, he brings a book and gets to rattle off as many synonyms as he can think of when the teacher asks. He’s challenged enough linguistically doing everything else in German. But for his classmates who are learning English, it’s a far more robust second-language education. They’re encouraged to watch videos and read in English to help build their skills while their brains are still absorbent.

Consequently, nearly everyone here speaks some English. They may not feel comfortable or confident in it, but the investment in foreign language education is evident in the language skills of the general public. I’ve asked many people over the years if they speak English, to which they often respond “little bit” and then proceed in perfectly competent conversational English. Their classification of a “little bit” far exceeds my own.

I’m working hard to learn German and I am glad to have passed my B1 exam last fall. I envy my children’s language exposure and their capacity for learning, yes, but more than that, I respect that the system here maintains its cultural integrity while also encouraging global aptitude. Sure, there might be a few eye-rolls when my German lets me down, but on the whole people are kind and accommodating. If I’ve put my foot in my mouth with some mixed up I before or after E action, no one has said anything. Maybe they’re laughing behind my back, but mostly I get the sense that they’re understanding, both conversationally and emotionally.

I’ve got 15 more weeks of class. It’s going to be a long haul. Some days, like 2:00 this afternoon, my brain will ring hollow. But I learned last time the importance of sticking with it. Some of it does stick in there, somehow. This time last year, I knew so much less, and two years ago, I could say hello and goodbye and that’s about it. When we first arrived in Berlin in 2024, I couldn’t even ask where to find a bathroom.

Learning looks different than it did when I was a kid. Learning sounds different for me than for my children, and I’m not crazy enough to expect my goal to be complete fluency. But I’ll keep showing up and let my brain do the rest.

And when all else fails, I’ve got help at home. Tonight, my daughter helpfully informed me that the German word for diarrhea is “Durchfall”--literally “falling through”-- so at least I’ve got that one locked down.