Facing Your Fears

I can say with utter and complete confidence: I am a social person. I’m outgoing, friendly, and perhaps the most talkative person in the room. Any room. But these kinds of- let us say…qualities -vanished during my initial months of learning German. Their vanishment was usually very poorly timed, such as talking to the baker or the cashier or literally everybody who lived within a fifty-mile radius of me. I probably should have just made small talk with people around me, to boost my skillset. God! It was a task! I wasn’t confiding in myself that it would have been okay to make mistakes, it would have been okay to stammer a bit; the people would have certainly not banished me from their country. With the dramatic staff thumping and weird close-ups of the priest’s face. Definitely not. That feeling was quite overwhelming. Particularly because I was good at the theory part of language, grammar, and comprehension. Precisely because of this, I felt I hadn’t yet managed to communicate with people around me. That was certainly the most important aspect: I felt I wasn’t going anywhere.

This all had gone on until one day when our teacher took us to a Café. It was supposedly the last session of our G1 level and we had just wanted to hang out a bit. I was sitting next to a guy from Bulgaria. The next thing was to break that ice. I didn’t want to spend that afternoon staring at others chit-chatting in whatever German they knew. I knew I had to talk. And that was it. I just started speaking, with mistakes. I didn’t know I could talk in whatever German I knew, for about an hour. And what was important was, this guy could understand me and his German wasn’t perfect yet either. Was it me? I managed to surprise myself.

The ice within me was broken. I got back to myself, this time with German. I wouldn’t be lying; I looked out for opportunities to talk with people around me. It was so much fun.

Try this out. Just speak. All of us possess the skill of communication. With a foreign language, it’s challenging initially, but the most amazing moment is when you know you can strike up a conversation with your language skills. Nothing can motivate you more towards improving it, as much as you can.

So, continue to believe in yourself and your language skills.

It’s an interesting journey with commas, question marks, and exclamations, but full-stop is certainly that distant.

Time for my Kaffee!

Bis Dann,

– Hitixa