Opportunities to speak

Living in the U.S., going about your daily affairs, how often would you think you could use a foreign language? I suppose if you lived in Miami or San Diego you could use Spanish quite often. What about Italian, or French, or … German? How often would you be able to use those languages?

You might be surprised.

As I wrote previously, my friend and colleague from Germany was here recently. We attended several work meetings and then got together a few times after work. It would have been easy – for me – to just speak English. It probably would have been easy for Viktor too, since his English is close to perfect and he wouldn’t have to suffer through my mistakes in German.

But we just started speaking German, just like we did in Germany. It was difficult for me at first, having been away from hearing and speaking German every day. I was having trouble getting the right sounds to come out of my mouth. But before too long I felt reasonably comfortable again. Encouraging.

The following week I had a work trip to California. One of the people I met had coincidentally lived and worked in Düsseldorf for several years. He had married a German woman, and spoke fluent German -- though with a California accent.

So one night at dinner, there we were, standing in the bar in San Jose speaking German – a comical scene, and something I never would have imagined.

On the way back home, at one of the airport shops in Houston, I noticed the cashier had an accent that sounded German. I asked, and yes, she was from Germany. We had a short conversation, as the line of puzzled customers started to grow behind me.

In Chagrin Falls, just a couple miles from where we live, there is store called the Ski & Sport Haus. The spelling of “Haus” might lead one to think that someone there has at least some knowledge of German. I stopped in the store not too long ago, and one of the women working there had an accent. She was one of the owners (or from the owners’ family), and she told me she was from Austria – which was then apparent from her accent when speaking German.

I had 4 years of Spanish in high school, and another semester in college, but never felt I was very fluent. When I think back on this, not once did I ever have the opportunity to speak it, as I did in these little interactions in German. I wonder now, was it that I didn’t have the opportunity or was it more that I didn’t look for the opportunity?

Many people have told me, if you want to learn the language, you have to be willing to try it – to speak it and to make mistakes. There is a saying in German, “Übung macht den Meister“. Literally that means „practice makes the master“. People said this to me on many occasions when I would apologize for my many mistakes. I wonder what my Spanish would be like had I followed that advice.