Der Weg zur Beherrschung einer Fremdsprache

The Road to the Mastery of a Foreign Language.
Der Weg zur Beherrschung einer Fremdsprache.

Making progress in a foreign language can seem very difficult. Almost no one advocates being either bilingual or a polyglot, and finding someone who is such from whom to learn or with whom you can talk is nearly impossible. The Spanish language has a lot going for it, for obvious reasons, as it is widely taught, and many native speakers abound. Other languages, even French (with Canada so near), are much more difficult to find help and company to assist in learning. Books, CDs and such are available, but we need more than just tools to learn a language - we need people. People are the sole reason to speak any language. For myself, my determination and passion are my driving forces, and they are paying off. If I can utilize both that and my experience and know-how in the German language to teach or help ANYBODY any aspect of it, should they desire to know, that would be wonderful.

After much determination and a long time of working hard, I finally am able to write complex German sentences. Once the pieces fell together, and I saw how it's supposed to work, I had a hard time understanding why I hadn't realized it sooner. It's difficult to explain exactly what I was doing wrong, as I get it now. I'm beginning to see that in learning how to improvise and pick up new scales on Guitar too - one of the tricks is you just have to keep pushing and pushing, working and working, see it through, and never stop. You have to make the mistakes to find out what works. You quickly begin to learn what doesn't work, what not to waste your time on, and you whittle it down to that which does. But this can take quite a while, depending on how advanced one wishes to become, so it always helps to have a guiding hand from someone who has experience. You can't put a price on experience. I happen to have the focus, because of my internal drive to become fluent in German, to push through the muck. Trust me, as in both arenas, if you keep pushing long enough, and with enough dedication, the pay-off is huge, as you get what you were looking for. But perhaps there are those who need a little guiding, a little incentive, to keep moving. It's easy to become dissuaded or uninterested. That's probably part of why it's taken me so long to get anywhere substantial in it, as finding those who speak it, or are even more than trivially interested in it, is very difficult (imagine when I get to Russian). If you don't use it, you lose it, and I incorporate German in my life every day, in song lyrics, journal entries, and other things, to keep its presence in my life. Otherwise, like an un-watered tree, it will wither and fade away.

For those who wish to learn more than one language, once you get past the barriers of the first new foreign language, the second (or third, or whatever) becomes loads easier. That's because one hardly ever looks at their mother tongue the way they have to approach a new language, because they were immersed in it from the get-go, and got grammar lessons and examples pounded at them daily. They simply had to learn it, if they wanted to communicate with anybody. A foreign language is a different case. Sometimes you have to artificially create the situation (as in my case). In Europe, many people know more than one language, simply due to the proximity of so many different countries.

I will translate this soon.