When I was in middle school and high school, I struggled a lot with learning both English and Chinese. In the end, I performed reasonably well in the relevant summative assessments (I obtained a 6 in English A1 SL and 7 in Mandarin B SL for my IB certificate), but it was always a struggle. I don’t think I struggled particularly with understanding or writing as far as English was concerned; I had more difficulty with decoding literary devices and interpreting poems and related themes. I found learning Chinese challenging, perhaps because I didn’t speak or listen to it much at home, and also because all other lessons were conducted in English.
I’m not sure if this has had a negative effect on my preference for language learning, though to some extent I certainly associate this with stress and difficulty. Nonetheless, about two months ago I decided to start learning German a bit more seriously.
I downloaded the Lingvist app after a colleague recommended it to me. The app performs pretty aggressive vocabulary drills – it’s been useful for plugging basic gaps and discovering new words. According to the app, I’ve learned about 1100 words; the app allows you to learn at most an additional 20 per day, though that’s usually enough to keep my hands full. I’ve been using up this quota most days.
However, the app doesn’t cover the principles underlying grammar, and of course the ability to train listening, speaking or writing is somewhat limited. I thus took an opportunity at work to start more formal lessons, which should help me get better at these skills. The teacher, Katja, has been great – I do understand a fair bit more now, and (hopefully!) sound better and clearer when I speak. I’ve found the lessons to go at a pretty decent pace; they can be demanding, but I like that.
Why German specifically? Firstly, it is a practical choice. German is relatively widely spoken especially considering the countries I might consider moving to, or at least plan on visiting for holidays in the future (which would include Germany and Switzerland).
Secondly, I’ve certainly picked up a few words from my time in Zurich, mainly “Ich spreche kein Deutsch” and how to navigate shops (imagine someone knowing that Rechnung means invoice or Insgesamt means total, but not knowing words like Vater – father – or Tschüss – goodbye), so I’m not exactly starting from zero in terms of vocabulary, even if my knowledge of the grammar and fundamentals may be lacking.
Finally, I find the way words are constructed or varied quite pleasing. I recently came across the word Nachfolger in Lingvist, which means “successor”; the parts mean “after” and “follower”. I’ve come across quite a number of words where the meaning makes sense considering the components, which is nice – Zeitpunkt (point in time) or Verantwortung (responsibility, but Antwort means answer – in a sense of being answerable for something) come to mind.
I anticipate that the grammar may be quite difficult to pick up – declension is considerably more prevalent in German than in English, where tricky cases are mainly in the pronouns, or Chinese. Gender for nouns that don’t obviously seem to have a biological or possibly identity gender is often arbitrary – for example, tables are male, flasks are female, and babies are neuter! In English, he and she are rarely used outside of these ‘clear’ cases (there are a few exceptions, e.g. ships or countries are sometimes feminine, though it generally still feels more natural to me to use ‘it’).
Grammatical cases seem to be another sticky point; articles and adjectives may be written differently depending on whether a noun is the subject or object. Das ist ein alter Drucker means ‘that is an old printer’, but I’d write Ich habe einen alten Drucker for ‘I have an old printer’ (printers are masculine). However, if I was talking about a lamp (feminine), I would have to write Das ist eine alte Lampe.
Furthermore, sentence structure is different. English and Chinese generally follow subject-verb-object ordering in a sentence. However, German features V2 order, where the verb usually must come second, but other than that things are more relaxed. For example, Every Saturday I read a book is fine as a sentence in English; 每个星期六我读一本书 would work in Chinese. However, the straight translation Jeden Samstag ich lese ein Buch is not OK in German; the verb has to be in position two, so it would have to be Jeden Samstag lese ich ein Buch (or Ich lese ein Buch jeden Samstag, or Ein Buch lese ich jeden Samstag depending on what is intended to be emphasised).
My formal knowledge of grammatical structures within English is also fairly lacking, even though I think I am able to differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in English. I had to refresh myself on what an infinitive was during the German course. German also has quite a few more constructs (e.g. accusative and dative cases) which will take some getting used to. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed learning so far, and plan on continuing to learn it, hopefully to at least a B1 level.
