Attempting to Learn German

I love learning languages, and I wanted to spend more time learning during the winter months, so not long ago I purchased Johnny Harris and Nathaniel Drew’s Ultimate Language Learning Guide from Bright Trip. I wanted something new, some external force to kickstart my Japanese learning because it had become quite stale, quite boring, and I wanted to tackle my studies in a new way.

They have a video titled “Motivation” that goes through the why you want learn the language in the first place, and with Japanese, I quickly filled up a page in my notebook with my reasons why I wanted to learn it. I thought I’d write a blog post detailing those reasons, but I didn’t. I didn’t because to me, nothing that I would have written would have been new to me. I started learning Japanese on my own around 2018 or 2019, so I’ve been going at it for a few years. It wasn’t a 2 week fad that quickly faded away but something I’ve kept at it for years because my motivation was clear: to go to Japan with the hopes of one day living there for a while.

Because that won’t happen for a while, I decided to do something new. In April of this year, I agreed to become the academic coordinator for a foreign exchange student in Germany. She arrived in August, and I’ve had nothing but good times since her arrival. The other day I heard her talk to her dad on the phone in German, and I absolutely enjoyed listening to her talk. Years ago I wrote about one day learning eight languages, and German was one of those eight. So I thought, why not learn German now?

So here I am today. I’m committing myself to learn German for the next 6 months or so. Mona, the foreign exchange student, will leave America in about that time, and my goal is to know enough German to hold a conversation with her before she leaves for Germany. I have no idea whether I will be able to by the end of these next 6 months, but I am very excited to try.

I know this will be hard, but that’s kinda the fun of it, isn’t it?