Learning German

A few weeks ago we were all gung ho to learn Greek. It went well with us learning the numbers, please, thank you, come on, good morning, etc. Since I took math and knew the Greek alphabet a little and so many English root words come from Greek language we could pick up some words and decipher others. We learned quite a bit in a short time.

Turkish was different. It was a different language family altogether and the struggle with the simplest words led to futility. I gave up. We weren’t in Serbia or Hungary long enough to make a go of it. Hungarian is the same language family as Turkish (and Finnish, why?) so I think I wouldn’t have succeeded in the short term.

In Austria, they speak German and it was immediately fun. Speaking English gives you such a head start that it seems easy in comparison to Turkish. It starts with “Guten morgan” and you immediately think “I can do this”. You’re confidence gets a test at the grocery store when the butcher asks a question about your order. Suddenly your 10 German words seem inadequate. This morning the check out girl didn’t know that I didn’t know German. A “guten morgan” with a couple of “ya, ya”s and a “danke schon”, and I walked out a master of the German language. I probably have 40 words now. Most of them I can retrieve in about 10 seconds, processing German words in real time is still hard for me.

Having a gut start at something gives you the desire to learn more and more. Ve vill start to feel more comfortable here the more ve learnen. Learnen die German has been wonderbar.