Skipping English

I know that a lot of people who want to learn a language with SpeaQ With Me are probably interested in English, because well it’s the most popular foreign language to learn. Well, I guess for me as a native speaker I can’t really tell you about my struggles learning it, so instead I wanted to share a contrasting story of how “just saying no to English” really helped me learn a foreign language and better appreciate the culture.

So the story starts in Oregon, when I was still in High School. The older brother of a friend of mine had just come back from an exchange year in Denmark with the Rotary organization and was telling me what a cool experience it had been. He managed to convince me that I should also give it a try, and so I applied to travel abroad the next school year. I managed to get a spot in the program and when it came time for me to let them know where I preferred to be sent, I said I wanted to go somewhere with snow so I could still cross-country ski in the winter. They ended up assigning me to Sweden, so I was pretty stoked about that.

Fear of French and Other Stories

This story is about my experiences with foreign languages. It starts with me being kind of unenthusiastic or scared of learning them in school, and goes all the way to the present where I use foreign languages every day for my job and just for fun.

My first contact with another language was in school. Starting at the age of 10, I had to take English classes like many other students here in Germany. I have never been too interested in learning it, but I guess it wasn’t too bad. Eventually, after a few years of English classes the time came to choose another elective subject, and I ended up picking French. Don’t ask me why, I guess because all my friends chose French too. I actually quite liked my first French class because it wasn’t like English “which everyone has to learn.”

Around the age of 16 I had to change schools and that’s when the whole foreign language situation flipped. The English I had learned at my old school was good enough to get through the new classes and I liked my teacher a lot. But what about French? Well, I have to say I had a really hard time. When I walked into the French class I noticed that I knew maybe a third of what the other students knew. My listening and speaking abilities were especially bad, and because the teacher taught the class only in French I missed a lot of what was going on at first. Still, I had to get through it because I couldn’t change my elective for that year. In the end I survived the class, but this experience kind of traumatized me and ruined my appreciation for the French language. For a really long time after that, I didn’t want to learn anything more about French and I also didn’t want to speak it.

Learning English in New Zealand

It was in the 5^th grade when I was forced to learn English. As someone who likes natural science over humanities I wasn’t pleased with this development in my life. I always had a hard time learning all the vocabulary and grammar. So it’s easy to say that English never became my favorite subject, maybe it was even the one I disliked the most.

That didn’t get any better when I got into the 7^th grade and we had to choose another language to learn. I had the choice between French and Latin. So for me basically it was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. I went with Latin. It seemed to be a little bit easier because there were rules to everything. But I also instantly knew this wouldn’t be fun either.

So that was the first part of my language education, sitting in school learning English and Latin. I still don’t like to think back to that time. Fortunately, everything changed when I went to New Zealand at the age of 16.

SpeaQwith.me - How an idea became a startup

Have you ever noticed what a huge difference there is between learning a language from a course or online tutorial, and actually using it in the real world? I can remember the first time I had that ah-ha moment as I was talking to a French exchange student. I had been studying French for a while and felt pretty good about all the grammar and vocabulary I knew, but when it came time to speak, suddenly all my carefully planned sentences seemed to fall apart!

So that was a bit frustrating, because of course I wanted to communicate in this language that I had been studying for so long. It helped me realize though, that textbook learning would only get me so far, and that to feel really comfortable in the language, I needed to spend more time listening and talking to native speakers.