I Wish I Were a Polyglot (Part 3)
There's a standard measure of language proficiency that's used in Europe (CEFR) and includes six levels: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2, with A1 being total beginner and C2 being near native speaker fluency. When I finished B2 level German classes last Spring, I felt like my German was about as good as my Spanish was when I arrived in Barcelona to study abroad. This was an exciting point to reach! But, unfortunately, it's where I've remained. I feel like if you dropped me in an immersive German experience (German-speaking host family and school or work) right now, I would be fluent in about a month.
Fluency as a concept is tricky and subjective so let me clarify what I mean. I'm not saying my German would be perfect. I wouldn't have all the grammar right and my vocabulary would still be much, much more limited than that of a native speaker. But I would be capable of living a whole life in German, just like I lived a whole life in Spanish when I studied abroad.
When I was in Barcelona, I had friends in my study abroad program who were native English speakers, and, yes, we did switch to English when it was just us. Throughout those months abroad, I also used English to talk to friends and family back home. But, I took university level classes in Spanish every day and I ate dinner and spoke with my host family in Spanish every night. That degree of language immersion was a far cry from my current (pandemic) life in Berlin where I can easily go days without using German.
Despite living in Germany, my home life is in English, my friendships are in English, and my work is in English. I have to really seek out opportunities to use and improve my German skills and that's... annoying. It's going to take a lot of time and commitment to get me over the German language plateau I've been stuck on. Hopefully, the class I started last night will help!
But, in the meantime, can you blame me for daydreaming about other languages?
If we had moved to a Spanish-speaking country in 2018, I think I would have been back to my study abroad level of fluency in a couple of months. I could have found work in Spanish or developed Spanish language friendships. At this point, my German is good enough that I could try to find work or develop friendships in German, but, you know, at this point, there's also a pandemic. Back at the start of 2020, my plan was to look for a part-time service industry job where I could improve my German, but... that plan changed, obviously.
Anyway, I don't want to keep dwelling on this hypothetical universe where we moved somewhere Spanish-speaking. Maybe if we lived in Spain, my home life, friendships, and work would still all be in English, and I'd be struggling to use and improve my Spanish. We can't know, and that's not really the note I want to end this newsletter on anyway.
I want to wrap up by saying that my current German level and life situation makes me feel like I need to really focus on German fluency before I can allow myself to return to Spanish or study a new language. And that's kind of disappointing. My German is at a point where I'm still learning new things, of course, but I also know how much I don't know and it doesn't always feel like I'm making progress. It's much easier to see progress when you're first learning a language and new things are clicking into place all the time. It's exciting to understand new words and put together sentences for the first time and take stock of how similar or different a new language is from your mother tongue. It's tempting to start practicing Turkish (or Polish or Mandarin or insert whatever language seems inspiring to you) on Duolingo in order to get some of that excitement back.
I guess this is where the title of this newsletter series comes into play. I wish I were a polyglot because I wish I could hold more languages in my head at once without fear of losing them. I wish I could start studying a new language without worrying that it's going to set me back in German. Maybe someday, right?