I haven’t touched any German since my B2 German exam in June and this needs to be rectified. I’ve been telling myself that I have learnt as much as one can in the classroom and that the next step is to live abroad in a German speaking country and become fluent through immersion. This is probably true but this won’t happen for me, at least not for the next two years. This is because I have already set the wheels in motion for getting my life, a priority, back on track. I have a full-time job now and am working on an application for further study in September 2014. This may sound like an excuse but it isn’t in this came. (I often find myself now asking myself if I making excuses. Only when I’m certain that I’m not do I proceed)
In high school, during my initial introduction to Japanese learning, I came across a blog and method called ‘All Japanese All the Time’. This young man of similar age turned his life upside down in the pursuit of language learning. He devoted every hour and every minute of his life to learning Japanese through immersion. He forced his brain to undergo a soaking in the Japanese language and most importantly, he didn’t half-ass it. Highly commendable.
I’m going to try his method for German. This means, every minute of my free time i.e. when I am not at work or doing something vitally important like a university application, I will be functioning in German. I will be reading in German, watching German TV, listening to German, memorising German sentences etc. Crazy? Perhaps, but this method is most certainly a very effective one but it comes at the very high cost of devout discipline. For me I find myself lacking in discipline but it is one trait I value and have been trying to bring into my life for a while now. I’m succeeding in bringing it in albeit very slowly for now; time to put the foot down on the accelerator. The reward for such a strenuous training program, the fluency of another language, is worth it and is kinda what I live for.
I’m going to do it, I’ll ease into it, but Ill do it. I already have a good monolingual German dictionary (by Langenscheidt if you’re interested) and I’ll make small steps like changing my OS, phone, games to German and I’m also going to abuse post-it notes and plaster them all over die Wände meines Zimmers. Like I said, baby steps, but I hope to completely shift over within a month and keep at it for numerous months to come. The blogger, whose method has inspired me, immersed himself in Japanese for 18 months and received his just reward at the end. Maybe I can reach that target on my first go, maybe not. Maybe I’ll even start blogging on German. It seems insurmountable at the moment but I have never really taxed myself in language learning as of yet despite it being my strongest area of study.
Here is the link where the method is detailed: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about
Something interesting about me is that I’m not sure why I’m learning German. I’m not doing it for
Fractured Future 