Getting Acquainted with Failure

Language learning has been a great experience for us so far. We are having a lot of fun, and it is amazing how quickly we are progressing. It is encouraging to look over the last two months and see how much we have grown in our language skills. I still remember what it felt like to have an entire conversation in German for the first time. I didn't understand everything, but I was able to express my ideas and understand the gist of what the other person was saying. Cool! But here is the thing. Even in the face of all this learning, we have also become close friends with failure.

We fail all the time. We make mistakes in class, when we are doing our home work, when we write anything or speak to anyone. We can't get away from it no matter how much we try. If we were to completely form all of our sentences and check them against every grammar table and dictionary, we would never say a word. One phrase has really stuck with me from our language training in Colorado: "You have to destroy the language on your way to mastering it."

Failure has become a close friend as we continue to live with the language barrier...but pressing into our failure also brings about humility. In our language class, there are lawyers, architects, and micriobiologists - all highly educated, highly competent people. And in class, you find us all speaking at a kindergarten level about zoo animals and going to the super market. We are being humbled. We know that we need to make 1,000,000 language mistakes on our way to mastering German, and so we have decided to start now and get as many as we can out of the way! We want to make accepting failure a step towards success, and this is the perfect testing ground to work out that idea.

Photo credit: lyns from morguefile.com

Speaking Like a Child

Last Friday marked the end of our first level of German classes. Here they call it the A1 level (here is an explanation of the language levels we plan to go through). We were really happy to hit this milestone. It is amazing how much you absorb in the beginning. It feels like you learn so much each day. Every night we go to bed very tired.  

I am sure I sound like my nephew. The last time we visited, he was learning how to use the phrase "of course." He said that phrase every few moments as he learned when how it fit into normal speech. From directly translated English expressions to odd word combinations, I am walking a child-like path of language learning.

We talked a lot in our training about a loss of competency. It is not as though I am mentally back on the same plane as a little child, but in terms of words, expressions, and nuances of meaning, I am on the level of a first or second grader.

I have felt this most acutely in our language classes. It is our teacher's job to take us into new territory. I feel often that we wander back and forth across the imaginary line of my personal competency in German. This "fish out of water" experience is a source of stress for living here. Even when I was in college, I rarely felt as though I needed to intensely concentrate on the class to track along with the professor. Some of this is my slightly ADD personality, but also we rarely covered ideas that we hadn't read about the night before. Even when the ideas were new, there was a familiar framework to work through and a common language in which things could be explained. It is an interesting paradox; our brains are designed to absorb language, but it also is such an emotionally resource-intensive experience.

It is a humbling feeling to be on the end of competency. Our whole class is feeling it in one way or another. We have many professionals and educated people in our class, and we are talking about the simplest things and forming the simplest sentences imaginable. It is a huge test of humility and one I hope I am able to meet head on. It gives me so much respect for the foreigners I have encountered in my own country and those that have earned degrees in a second language.

Question: When have you felt a loss of competency in your life? Birth of a child? New job? Moving to a new area?

Photo credit farmer64 from morguefile.com