An edited version of this article appears on the blog of the Akademikerhilfe - an organisation which supports students by providing affordable and community-focused accommodation in cities across Austria and runs the accommodation I'm currently staying in.
Alongside old photos from school exchanges, seasonal decorations and European maps, the walls of the languages’ corridor at my secondary school were plastered with reasons to learn languages. They ranged from the more convincing ones about the benefits for employability to the more sweeping claims that languages will be the key to finding your future partner. If you didn’t spend your final two years of school essentially living in the German department (and considering I was the only A-Level German student, I don’t think you did), it might well be the case that you’ve forgotten what these are – in which case, today’s post is for you! The following reflections come from one who has created more Quizlet sets than Instagram posts; from one who is apparently so committed to the language-learning cause that moving abroad during a pandemic and the end of the Brexit transition period seemed like the only reasonable thing to do when faced with such uncertain circumstances.
Etwas Unerwartet
Etwas Unerwartet – Something Unexpected – was the prompt for a photo challenge which ran during a trip to Weimar I went on some years ago with the UK-German Connection, and quickly became an enduring catchphrase of mine. Spending a summer hurtling around Thuringia in unstable vehicles – whether that be trucks deep underground in a salt mine, or a vertiginous Rodelbahn – celebrating Goethe’s 268th birthday party, and making the local paper? Etwas unerwartet! Spending over twelve hours travelling from London to Vienna via a five-hour layover in Paris? Definitely etwas unerwartet! Over the past few years I have found myself in a whole range of obscure and previously unfathomable situations due to my interest in languages, and have learnt to just embrace whatever bizarre circumstances I find myself in. After all, it does make for smashing blog content.
Exploring the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar - if you're interested in learning more about this fascinating movement, I'd recommend the novel 'The Hiding Game' by Naomi Wood.
Let it go, lass jetzt los!
High-pressured academic environments have a tendency to lead to crippling perfectionism, which results in an inordinate amount of stress and late nights, as submitting anything but the very best essay leaves you feeling like a failure. Learning a language is a great remedy for this, as you soon realise that you will at first have to sacrifice grammatical accuracy and adjective endings if you want to maintain the pace of the conversation or convey a story to a native speaker. At the beginning of my Year Abroad I was often quite hesitant to join a conversation, and would plan my sentences in my head first, but at some point I accepted that I wasn’t going to improve by staying silent, and just let the perfectionism and shame of forgetting the verb go. There are often times when you don’t know a crucial word and can’t, or don’t want to, whip out your phone to google it, but try to see these as creative opportunities to practise your improvisation skills. It will also no doubt make you into a winning team-member the next time you play the boardgame Articulate!.
Story time!
One of the most obvious and cliché reasons to learn languages is that they break down barriers, enabling you to forge personal connections with people you otherwise might not have even met, to enjoy literary masterpieces in their original, or to gain a deeper appreciation and nuanced understanding of another culture. People can be quite different when speaking their second language, myself included, and conversing with them in their mother-tongue almost unlocks a new level of their personality. It wasn’t until I started learning and chatting to one of my best friends, Eve, in Dutch that I realised that the English-speaking Eve I knew was an ever so slightly a toned-down version, and that she was even more wacky and wonderful in Dutch. People are also more likely to open up and move from discussing the weather to more personal matters (maybe even their faith!) when they can trust you can fully understand what it is they’re sharing, and pick up on the gravity, or indeed levity, of the situation. I think I’ve also learnt that even though the language barrier might seem untraversable at first, it is often not as great as you might make it out to be in your mind, and with a bit of good humour, sensitivity and perseverance, you will be over it in no time at all.
Glad to say I'm finally back in Wien - here's Heldenplatz looking particularly dreamy.
Klein aber fein (small but excellent)
I’ve just looked up statistics on the number of A-Level German exam entries in order to illustrate my point, and they’re actually a lot worse than I remember – 4866 in 2011, dropping down to 2864 in 2019. French and Spanish are more popular choices, and there are still considerably more girls taking languages at A-Level than boys, but neither of these cover up the fact that the British A-Level linguist is an endangered breed. My German teacher, who launched a yearly valiant recruitment campaign, always insisted it was about ‘quality not quantity’, but I do admit it would have been nice to have had some classmates. There’s also something very amusing about being admired and applauded for speaking foreign languages in the UK, and then coming to Europe, and being questioned by friends who are fluent in three languages and excelling at Law or Politics (or even both), as to why you’re studying languages as your degree.
And finally… Humility
Catholic friends might know or have heard stories about the Litany of Humility – a repetitive prayer to help one draw closer to God through the virtue of humility. For my secular friends, I can heartily suggest language learning if you want to grow in humility – you will make a fool of yourself more times than you thought possible, and find yourselves struggling to express yourself and side-lined in social situations in which you’d normally be in your element. You will feel like a stand-up comedian whose jokes don’t get a laugh, a linguistic outsider who is perhaps underestimated, or even ignored at first. But I’ve found that these circumstances have given me two valuable things – a fresh perspective on how those who don’t have English as a native language feel in the UK, and a fierce determination to keep on improving until someone finally laughs at my jokes.
Humility isn't really very photographic, here's the snowy view I woke up to this morning!
There are a myriad of reasons as to why you might want to dabble in some Dutch literature, jump into some Japanese speechwriting, or tackle some Tagalog, and the lessons I’ve learnt in doing so have extended far beyond the walls of the languages’ corridor at school. But before I get side-tracked by tales of Patatje Oorlog (fries with peanut sauce), steaming bowls of ramen, and mouth-watering Chicken Adobo, I think I’ll leave this one here and hope it’s provided you with a little food for thought today. On that note, I'm off to make myself some dinner.
Bis bald!