(a small) Language milestone

I have this picture in my head that someday I will walk into a German bar, order a beer, sit down, and have a regular conversation in German about yesterday’s football match (European, that is), or smoking bans (works for me), or speed limits on the Autobahn (not sure about that one).

Right now though, my attempts to speak German often center on my attempts to speak German. That’s true in more than one way.

My own self-consciousness and focus on getting the language right mean the communication sometimes comes second. When my attention is mostly on the language itself it’s easy to lose sight of the most important aspect, which is that I’m communicating with another person.

Often the conversation turns to my learning of German. Partly this is because people seem curious about it. Partly it’s because this is one of my stock set of things I can talk about – little conversation tidbits that I now know well, that relieve some of the pressure of getting the language right.

I want badly to get to the point where I can have a conversation without being self-conscious about it, and without having to talk about my learning of German. I know that for the most part this is a matter of time and practice, but I have a feeling it’s a matter of also letting go of mostly being concerned with saying things correctly.

I reached one small milestone a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even realize this until after the fact. I had gone up to the coffee room where one of the guys in the office, who I’d not met before, started up a conversation with me. He somehow knew I was from the U.S., and he was asking about what my assignment was, what I did in the U.S., how long I was staying, etc. I asked him about what he did, how long he’d been at the company, etc.

It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized we’d had a normal conversation, that I hadn’t been nervous about it, and that we hadn’t talked mostly about my learning German. Now this was a 5 minute conversation of very limited scope, so I don’t want to make too big of a deal about it. It’s not like I was discussing German philosophers … but I suppose even they had to start with something small.