Guten Tag

means ‘Good day’ in German. I’ve been trying to pick up or learn German for quite some time now. I bought German pocket book that I can carry everywhere I go. Oliver bought me an audio learning device that he hope could accelerate my learning progress in German.

Having said these, I have to admit, I have not been a good, consistent learner. Maybe for the first few weeks, I’ll be all enthusiastic to learn new words or phrases each day. I’ll even show it off to Oliver over the phone. ‘Hallo liebe’ ‘Wie gehts?’ ‘Was machst du heute Abend?’ ‘Mench,du bist langweilig!’ All of that means in this order, ‘Hello love’, ‘how’s it going?’, ‘What are you doing this evening?’, and ‘Crikey, you’re so boring!’

German is an interesting language. Picking up words is easy. But saying it in a proper and correct grammar is another matter. I know a lot of words independently. I know how to count from 1 to thousands, I know the days in order. I know that ‘brot’ is bread and ‘gemuse’ is vegetable among many other food. I’ve learnt quite a few adjectives. I know simple greetings. It’s all up there in my head. Tons of it all jumbled up. My problem is practicing it on a daily basis. Other than with Oliver, I don’t really have the avenue to practice it. Even with Oliver, I hardly try to converse German with him. The most would be ‘Was?’(pronounced as ‘vas’ means What?’) or ‘Warum?’ (pronounced as ‘varum’ means Why?’) and my favourite one ‘Ach so’ which is an expression for ‘I see’.

My worry is this, that if I do join Oliver in Germany after we get marry, I felt like I need to know German in order to fit in, get by or ease myself into that transition of being in a foreign place. What more if I need to find a job or continue my masters, which I aim to do. Further to this quandary, living here in Kota Kinabalu, while there is a demand to learn foreign languages like Korean or Japanese, there is none for German. A while back, I was looking for a German Language course locally, I stumbled upon this local institution that said it conducts German course. I called up the contact person to know when the course is starting. According to the contact person, they need at least 6 people to register for the course in order to start the course. And guess what, I’m the first to register. The person was supposed to get back to me once they have enough people to start the course. That was about 6 months ago.

So, I guess it’s back to self-learning. But first, I need to rekindle that enthusiasm to learn German. Pick up my pocket book and learn a word/phrase each day. Listen to the audio learning. Let it be my lullaby. Practice it with Oliver. Even, if he’s not the most patient teacher. There is this German restaurant here ‘Gunters Gasthaus’, just a little bit out of town and I’ve heard that the owner (who passed away awhile back) was a German and he married a local. So, I had the inkling that maybe, the wife may know how to speak German. Thought I drop by one day to check out the restaurant and perhaps see if we could do the weekly meet up and I could practice conversing in German with her. It’s a plan.

Till then. Auf Wiedersehen. (Bye in formal)