“Ah! I understood that”

Sara, 19. Dezember 2019

Over the past 5 months I have taken extensive German classes Monday to Thursday for 3 hours. I started with level A1 and I am now entering the B1 level. In all honestly, it has been difficult to keep going. Learning the language requires having to process a lot of new information, but I am starting to get used to it in a way I never thought possible. Last week I asked a question to a random man in German, and he replied in German and I understood! I felt so much joy. It is those little moments that keep me motivated to continue learning. Those little moments when you overhear a conversation on the u-bahn and you think in your head “Ah I understood that”. Or when you read something on a billboard and directly get it. Or even when you pronounce a word with an Umlaut letter correctly (ä, ö, ü). Once you start noticing the progress you are making in your everyday life, it hits you that you are getting there and it makes all the hard work worth it. I mean who would have thought that in 5 months I would be able to ask questions to people and communicate in my day to day life in GERMAN?

Sometimes at the end of a long day, I become unable to speak in one coherent way. Since I speak French with my parents, Arabic with my grandparents, English with my friends and German in my daily life I start to sound comme this le soir when ich bin fatiguee. That’s just one sentence with a mix of languages that describes perfectly what goes on in my brain at the end of a long day!