German is hard. Everyone tells you this when you start to learn the language, especially Germans. There are three genders and four cases that come together to create six different ways to say “the”: der, die, das, den, dem and des. And so, when you want to use any given noun, you must first consider the completely arbitrary gender of the noun and then how the noun is being employed in the sentence. This, along with the many other complex and specific idiosyncrasies of the German language, leads to what I like to call “Deutsch delirium.”
Deutsch delirium is the state you reach after using every brain cell you have to speak fully correct German. Suddenly everything is funny, nothing makes sense and words lose all meaning. It feels a little bit like being drunk or sleep deprived. Yet despite, or maybe because of, my many moments of Deutsch delirium, I’ve learned how to go about my life in German immersion.
Learning German through immersion has been one of the most difficult yet most fun and valuable experiences of my time in Germany. I’ll never forget laughing until I couldn’t breathe while doing German and English tongue twisters with my three German housemates, or the time at the end of a night out when I chatted with a late-night döner employee about how hard it is to learn German and what it’s like to be from the U.S.
I could go on and on recounting moments where it didn’t matter that my German wasn’t perfect — the moments where I was still able to laugh and connect with people across the ‘language barrier.’ I’ve learned that sometimes this ‘barrier’ is actually more unifying than dividing. At least it is when we don’t take grammar too seriously and instead use language for its true purpose: communicating and connecting with the people around us. Maybe this is crazy coming from a former Daily editor, but learning German has taught me how little grammar actually matters.
While I am excited to return to the U.S. and be able to understand every sign and conversation around me with ease, I am going to miss feeling challenged every day to learn a new language. I am going to miss using the hyper-specific German words I’ve learned that don’t exist in English.
But then again, the bigger things I have learned from the process of learning German will not be left behind. The most important of which is that speaking English, the lingua franca, is a privilege. My German doesn’t have to be perfect even in Germany because so many people speak English. But that premise doesn’t work the other way around.
