Throughout my time in school, I never struggled as much as I have with German. While I am not the best at every subject in college, it certainly doesn’t compare to the uphill challenge of learning a new language paired with full immersion in Germany. Everywhere I go, I have to have my ‘listening ears’ activated and give everything my full brain power. When you’re surrounded by a foreign language, in a foreign city, the only thing you can do is power through it. Let me tell you all about my struggles and how I combated them while studying abroad in Munchen.
Although I started my German language journey a few years back and have successfully completed all of the German courses at Pitt-Greensburg, studying here was still a struggle for me. I was nervous as can be leading up to my first course because I wasn’t sure how I would compare to the others in my class, but as it turns out I was exactly where I needed to be, and I know that I would thrive in that classroom if I gave it my all.
Normally in my college classes, I put forth my strength in leadership and I am always participating and leading discussions. I am always ready to contribute to the conversation and speak my mind freely. Since starting my classes at the Goethe-Institute, I struggled a bit to speak as freely and show my strong academic leadership skills because it was hard to me to find my words in a timely manner and ensure my sentences were grammatically correct and displayed my intelligence. The first week was really hard, because I found myself not talking as much as would have liked to in fear of speaking incorrectly and making myself sound uneducated. Fortunately, after listening to my peers in class talk out and freely make mistakes, I found my nerves dying down, and I realized that we were all in the same boat with our skills.
Come the second week I felt much more confident and found myself really contributing and feeling good about speaking in front of the class and making mistakes. I am so glad that I had very patient teachers who were encouraging us to make mistakes and grow from them. A lot of times, if one person made a mistake, it was likely that others had made the same mistake and were too afraid to speak up like I was at first. These opportunities to grow not only helped myself, but others in the class with their unwillingness to talk and make mistakes. Come the end of the course, everyone was speaking freely and we all shared a lot of laughs while doing so. For instance, one of my peers struggled a bit with vocabulary, as did the rest of us, and he tried to translate the teachers name in a sentence we were given. After I explained that it was the name of our teacher, we both started laughing so hard it brought us both to tears. These are the moments in language courses that really connect us and help us feel more confident.
One of my favorite activities during this program, was meeting up with the other students form Pitt in the Mensche (cafeteria) in Gastehaus and going over our work from that day. It was a great way of coming together and showing our strength of teamwork. Some of the students were in classes above me and others were below me, so it gave us an opportunity to come together and help each other out and make sense of what we had learned.
By the end of the course, we all had gotten so close. The environment inside the classroom was so welcoming that it started to feel as though it was a little family. Everyone helped each other out, and no one was there judging anyone else, because at the end of the day, we were all in the same class and came for the same reason – to better ourselves in our German language proficiency. If I was given the opportunity, I would stay and take the rest of the courses and a move up levels with the same students who gave me the courage to speak freeing and make mistakes. I am going to miss my new friends so much, but I will never forget the time that I had while studying abroad.