mediocrelanguagelearner

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

Midsummer celebration, 1906, Sweden.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

Glad midsommar!

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

19.06.2025

In den letzten zwei Wochen bin ich fast jeden Tag abends rausgegangen und spaziere ungefähr eine Stunde. Und dabei Spreche ich mit Leuten auf Discord, meistens auf Deutsch. Die Natur ist jetzt so schön, die Linde und Kamillen riechen sooo gut, und ich habe auch Kirschen gefunden, die so lecker schmecken.

Ich bin so stolz auf mich, dass ich so viel auf Deutsch gesprochen habe – auf Deutsch zu sprechen war für mich immer das schwerste. Gleichzeitig fühle ich mich aber nicht so wohl, was mein Deutsch betrifft. Ich habe darüber nachdegacht, vielleicht das Goethe Zertifikat B2 zu erwerben, aber als ich meine Sprachkentnisse gehört habe, vertraue ich mir nicht. Auch was die Grammatik betrifft. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich jetzt monatenlang viel Mühe dazu geben sollte, oder ob es etwas ist, was ich nicht brauche und nicht versuchen sollte.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

Don’t sin

I wish, sometimes it’s not possible!

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

Das Leben diese Woche...

Am Montag bin ich Erdbeeren pflücken gegangen. Das habe ich letzte Woche das erste Mal gemacht. Es hat wirklich Spaß gemacht und ich bin damit so zufrieden – mit dem Preis (der ein bisschen höher ist als mir lieb ist. Trotzdem ist es viel günstiger als im Supermarkt) und auch damit, dass die Erdbeeren lokal hergestellt sind. Und damit hoffentlich Umweltfreundlich. Ich habe die Hälfte zermixt und in das Gefrierfach gelegt, um sie im Winter essen zu können, und die zweite Hälfte frisch genossen.

Ich habe auch endlich das neue Buch von John Green bekommen. Es ist in März rausgegangen, aber ich müsste darauf warten, dass ein Freund es aus den USA mitbringt. Ich mag das Buch mehr, als ich erwartet habe, und gestern habe ich mir ein bisschen Lesenzeit in dem Rosarium gegönnt.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

Thank you for sharing your interesting story! I can relate so much to being in love with English and didn't liking your native language. during my teenage years English was my biggest love, I consumed everything in it and nothing in Czech. I'm glad that changed.

I didn't like German when I was in school but I was forced to have German classes, which didn't help at all. I'm glad my attitude towards German changed and I found a lot of things about it that I love. I've learnt German for half of my life but still struggle with it so much, my biggest weaknes is speaking, I've always felt soooo embarassed speaking German. I still do. But I'm trying to work on it!

Hallo! I appreciate how much you want to help us learn German! If you could do me a favor, could you share why you love the German language? I was forced to learn it when I was young and because of the teaching methods I was left only with a bad taste and anxiety. I reached proficiency level B2 but it's been years since then. Now that I'm older and want to remember German, I'm afraid I am not able to appreciate it, even though it has lots of cool elements and quirks. It's difficult for me to approach it as a living language and not as preparation for a test. Most of all, I find it hard to re-learn a language when teachers have stripped all the fun and passion from it 🥺 I was hoping you could re-ignite my interest by sharing yours (and perhaps share some generic advice for my sad situation)

Danke schonmal!

Hallo!

I know exactly what you're talking about, as I had that experience with French and Latin. I wish fewer people had experiences like that.

As for why I love German (and why I'm so excited about teaching it), you'll have to get through a long-ish little life story...

I haven't always loved the German language. My sister is 6 years older than me, and when I was around 11, she did a year abroad in Canada. I'd already had English in school for for about a year and knowing that I, too, could go to Canada later really pushed me to learn English. That's also when I started to be online more... blablabla... by the time the application process for Canada was in full swing, my English was really good and my dislike for German had grown to a maximum. To 15 year-old me, English was THE language; all the content I liked was in English, all the music, all the books, etc. German was ugly to me, simply because it wasn't English.

Around six months after I returned from Canada, I started 11th grade. In my state in Germany, each student picks 3 subjects that they're going to have 5h/week (the rest only 2 or 3), which will go way more in-depth than their respective "basic" courses and which will be the subjects they write their final written exam (the Abiturprüfung) in at the end of the 12th grade.

I chose History, English and German. History was the odd one out, really, but I loved the teacher. German I'd always been quite good in (except for use of commas) as I'd loved writing stories as a kid (though of course eventually I stopped writing in German and started writing in English). English was a no-brainer.

Now my German teacher wasn't what changed my mind, in fact she was a bit awful sometimes, though mostly she was fine. My mind wasn't really changing yet, but I did enjoy the class, because I was good in it (we'll ignore the semester where I was unwell and thus sucked ass and miserably failed Goethe). I felt really ready for the final exam and enjoyed the feeling of knowing two books really really well and being able to compare them beyond superficial aspects. German as a school/literary subject made me feel strong.

After highschool, I did a volunteer year at an archive because I was considering studying history and then becoming an archivist. Safe to say I didn't like it all that much, and watching my colleagues sit alone in their (albeit fancy old) rooms, having so little human interaction each day, i scrapped my plans.

Because the archive had little work for me, I spent a lot of my time at my desk learning Dutch. This was the first time that I'd actively learned a language outside of school and was when I first started seeing language learning as an interest of mine.

I also picked Latin back up. I'd had a tyrant of a teacher in my first two years, which led to me not knowing the basics and feeling absolutely awful in every class. Later teachers were better but the damage was already done and it was too much to catch up on and too little of a priority.

With my graduation (or really already with passing the 10th grade), I officially held the "Latinum", a certificate for knowledge of Latin (not the highest, but still). I honestly felt inadequate, having this certificate but none of know knowledge it represents. Being more aware of language learning outside of school, I went to my public library and borrowed "Endlich Zeit für Latein" by Hueber, a complete study-at-home book made for adults who'd wanted to learn Latin all their life but never got the chance to. This wasn't me exactly, but it fit the bill and I ended up really loving the book. Declensions suddenly made more sense. I could read a sentence and already know broadly what it was about. Nowadays I even tutor Latin on the side.

At the same time that I was doing the volunteer year, I was tutoring a couple kids in English, German and Maths of all things, which I hadn't been particularly good at for most of my school career, but I suppose that gave me a knack for explaining it.

Over the year, I got so frustrated with math teachers, through second-hand accounts of their words and actions, to be fair, but also thinking back to my own, and to the one that made it all better in the end, so frustrated that eventually I decided to study Maths and English B.Ed. and try and do a better job.

Sometime before I started uni, I started being interesting in etymologies. At first it was mainly idioms (whose etymology can be hard to figure out, unfortunately), but knowing multiple languages really lends itself to seeing connections, so I started wondering about German more overall. There were also some German musicians whose music I liked. Maybe German wasn't inherently awful?

With endless amounts of time, I know I could've managed maths, but it was too much work studying, leaving too little time for life and giving too little security to pass exams (in numbers: out of four exams I passed not a single one).

So, after a semester I decided to drop maths, and because I couldn't find a subject to replace it (one, that I was good in and that I would want to study for five years and then teach for the rest of my life), I decided to give up a B.Ed. altogether. I had considered doing Anglistik & Germanistik for the B.Ed., but man, I couldn't get excited about learning middle high German or reading loads of German literature - it's just not what I cared about. If anything, I cared about words and what they mean, and how they connect to make meaning, and how to learn them (!), as I've actively been learning other languages for 8 years, including on my own for 2 years.

I looked through the list of all degrees offered at my uni; something in the humanities, that was all I kind of knew. I stumbled across linguistics but that seemed to general to me. Then I found German Second Language Acquisition (DaZ) (Teaching German to non-natives who live in a German speaking country). It included German linguistics, as well as a boatload of didactics (which you don't really get in the B.Ed., annoyingly). For a couple weeks I hesitated, they I signed up for it, keeping English as my minor.

Usually, once I decide something, I get really excited for it. And I was really excited for German SLA. In the first semester I had linguistics seminars with the Germanistik students, and I loved it. I really enjoyed learning all the rules I didn't know existed. Syllables and the sonority hierarchy, syntax patterns, morphology, ...

I'd always seen mistakes everywhere: in the academic writing style of my fiance, in the signs outside a store, ... Now, I saw rules that were broken. Not like a judge confronted with a defendant, not asking for retribution for language crimes. But where a rule was broken, a rule was possible to follow. It stopped being "That's wrong. It should be xyz", and it started being "Oh, that doesn't adhere to V2-position, that's why it sounds wrong to me." I was able to articulate what rule was broken and, if asked, could explain how to follow it.

Almost more importantly than that, my professors are hell-bent on teaching everyone in their seminars to see progress. We're a small group of students for our major, so usually there's 8 of us and 15 others, studying Germanistik, another languages or any B.Ed.

Something that comes up early on in every course is listening to or reading an output example, sometimes by non-natives, sometimes by native toddlers. We hear/read the sample and then get asked for what we noticed. Inevitably, hands go up talking about case mistakes, gender mistakes, syntax mistakes, et cetera. "Okay, but what did they do right?" is usually the next question and it usually stumps students.

It's really easy to see what's wrong but it can be quite hard to be specific about what's right.

A step further, not all mistakes are equal. "Die Hase" for example, is a gender mistake, it should be "Der Hase", but Hase is one of the exceptions to the rule that words ending in -e are feminine more often than not (die Hose, die Tasche, die Liebe, die Sache, ...; some exceptions: der Junge, der Hase, der Löwe); the two two words alone don't tell us much, but with context we might see that the speaker has acquired the rule and has simply not learned the exception. And that is much more helpful and reassuring information than "that's wrong. it's DER Hase".

I like rules, I like not having to guess, but I also like flexibility. German provides both. Why do we have cases? To allow word order to be flexible. Why do we have gender? To make references clearer. And so on.

German is not inherently more beautiful or more ugly than any other language. I was wrong when I was 14. You're wrong about a lot of things at 14.

Nowadays, German is beautiful to me. Curiously, German mistakes are beautiful to me. They're not an error in the void, they belong to someone's interlanguage, their not-yet-fully-fleshed-out understanding of German. Isn't seeing that so personal? Intimate, even? This is how you understand my mother tongue to work.

I don't get many asks here, but when I do, they're often questions about German language things I would have never ever wondered about because I haven't noticed them, because it flows out of me, I don't have to think. For a while I didn't want to think about German, not even in it. Now I get to do both, and I revel in it. And English and German can co-exist, as friends, part-time lovers.

I don't think we get to chose what we find beautiful but I also don't think you need to find German beautiful to have at it again. I didn't find Latin beautiful, had never liked it, associated it with worry, fear, and guilt. But by myself, with a textbook that started at zero, that could never yell or be disappointed - it was easy, calm.

Some generic advice for you:

@make German be alive to you:

There's so much German YouTube, Netflix, Music, etc. out there for the taking. German exists in more people's real life than there are tests to prepare for. I know you already know this.

Try immersion, there's probably not been a lot of that in your class.

Consider the communicative aspect of language learning. Learn what you'd want to talk/write about. Don't bother with weather terminology if you don't care to talk about it. Bother with beetle terminology if that excites you.

If you remember the teaching methods you hated/that made you feel bad: don't use them. There's always alternatives. Roads, Rome ... you know the rest.

Surround yourself with kind, excited people who see progress and not only mistakes. Find what excites you. Take your time.

I suppose this goes for most things in life.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

Hoy es mi aniversario del aprendizaje de español! He estado aprendiéndolo por 8 años. Qué tiempo! Estoy feliz porque con el español ha venido a mi vida muchas cosas bonitas y agradables, pero también me siento un poco avergonzada y triste que mi nivel no es tan alto. 8 años es un tiempo largo y, aunque español nunca ha sido mi prioridad, siento que debería hablar como un nativo después de este tiempo. Sé que es una tontería y que todos somos diferentes, pero vivir en el mundo de los polyglots me influye.

A pesar de todo, estoy muy feliz de haber decidido aprender español hace todos esos años. Y aquí voy a compartir la primera canción española en que me enamoré – la escuché cuándo estábamos regresando con un grupo de gente de Gránada a las montañas donde vivíamos, el sol se estaba poniendo y en ese momento todo fue perfecto.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

the internet really started to feel like a big ad to me when i tried to get back into the language learning community on youtube but realised every youtuber i used to watch are now only making videos about productivity and learning a language as fast as possible, or more efficiently, trying to convince you to use this method instead of this other, routine planning FUCK IT'S SO DAMN EXHAUSTING that community used to be a place for me to just enjoy the company of a fellow language lover, see what they were doing, how they were learning, not them trying to sell me their own routine, it was just about sharing. i don't need a new method or a new routine or to learn this language in 3 months, i'm fine the way i am. what i do need is a place to rest from studying but still enjoy the world of languages and learning.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

thanks for tagging me!

the last song you sang aloud: canción sin miedo by Vivir Quintana

your favourite crisp flavor: mustard (cyrilovy brambůrky my beloved)

the last book you opened: Životice by Karin Lednická

earbuds, headphones, or nothing: earbuds, but with a cord and not the ones with "plugs" at the end, I can't put them in my ears

the last place you went, other than home: work

a color that looks good on you: blue, I guess?

the last trailer you saw: the new Lilo & Stitch

tagging @tolstayas @corvid-language-library and @magidioma

a fun lil catch up tag game! ❣️

tysm @chiimi-png for the tag! 🩷✨

the last song you sang aloud: tbh i don't remember, i'm quite introverted so i don't usually sing out loud 😅

your favourite crisp flavor: anything spicy or cheesy

the last book you opened: The Paul Street Boys - Ferenc Molnár (i loved this book when i was a kid, planning to read it in German too, wish me luck! 😅)

earbuds, headphones, or nothing: switched from headphones to earbuds

the last place you went, other than home: went to church, because it was a holiday

a color that looks good on you: dark cherry red or burgundy

the last trailer you saw: i think it was the trailer for "Snow White 2025", everyone seems to hate it and i was curious to see why 😅😂

tagging @frenchiepal @largefluff @getbreaded @getstuffdoneplease @mediocrelanguagelearner and anyone else who wants to join! 🩷✨

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

12.05.2025, Honö and Göteborg, Sweden

Another dream of mine was to visit some part of the Göteborg archipalago. As always, I wished we had more time to see the whole island, to just enjoy the seagulls and jellyfish and the feeling of the island. But even though we got just a taste, the island made a great impression on us.

I've been to Göteborg two times already but always stayed in the same area, this time I was glad to see another part of the city. Compared to the past days where we've been in nature and mostly alone, it was a clear difference, but I enjoyed the city too. And I heard Swedish all around! We stopped by in Myrorna again and left with unexpected 4 books. It seems like I've got a big stash of books I need to work through.

Oh and the others swam in the lake on the last photo. I'm too much of a badkruka to do it, but looking at the lake was enough for me.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

12.05.2025, Marstrand, Sweden

Finally, sunny Marstrand! We were there last year but we didn't see anything – there was a huge rainstrom. This year we were rewarded by perfect weather and perfect views.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

11.05.2025, Grundsund and Havstensklippan, Sweden

Another great town, another great promenade, unbelievable amounts of jellyfish (I've never seen them before!), the prettiest green church and great views of the sea and islands.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

10.5.2025, Lysekil, Sweden

Another core memory! The sun setting on the promenade. You could see how much love and creativity was poured into making the promenade. And the rocks! The orange silky rocks! We sat on every bench and just looked around. Best evening in Sweden.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

11.05.2025, Lysekil and Fiskebäckskil, Sweden

Another short walk in Lysekil in the morning. Can I live there please? I would go for a walk on the rocks every day and just sit there and think. But maybe it gets too touristy in the summer? I don't know, but we were lucky, there was almost nobody else there with us. After the walk we took a ferry and stopped for a couple of minutes in Fiskebäckskil – the view from there is great! It's so nice to see the huge Lysekil church from the other side of the fjord.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

10.05.2025, Grebbestad and Fjälbacka, Sweden

I will be repeating myself, but every town on the coast we visited was so beautiful. The weather was great so the sky and the sea were such pretty colours, complimenting the cliffs and the houses. We had to climb up at least one hill in every town to see it all from above.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

10.05.2025, Bohuslän, Sweden

Early mornings walk around Tjurpannans Naturreservat, we were in love! I'd like to have more time there, it was so peaceful and the rock so beautiful. I guess you can tell Czechs don't have sea, we are always stunned by how pretty it is.

[mediocrelanguagelearner]

09.05.2025, Dalsland and a bit of Bohuslän, Sweden

We hiked to the highest point in Dalsland, Baljåsen, enjoyed a 9 km walk in Bengtsfors and had a lot of fun looking at the carvings at Fossum and Tanum. Honestly, they were so pretty and interesting! I'm really glad we got to see them.