Learning German - 2

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ll come back to this topic from time to time.    Sadly, I’m still not fluent but give me some credit for the creative strategies I’ve developed to overcome my learning disability (as an American).  It appears that once you attain a certain proficiency level,  courses are surprisingly difficult to find, especially if your schedule is not infinitely flexible (i.e. you’re employed).  Several  years ago, I paid a neighbor kid to speak with me once or twice a week.   He’s now a law student at the Uni Basel and has partially paid his way by teaching German.  I like to think that I kick started this for him.  More recently, as part of an effort to improve my Swiss German, I joined the “Tandem Partner” program at the university.  This is a program through which you get together with people who are native in your language of interest and you split the time, speaking your mother tongue half the time and theirs the other half.   It’s not very time efficient but has led to my meeting some interesting people.   One of them was Jonathan,  a terrifically nice young man who had just finished medical school and was applying for a fellowship in the US.  In order to do this he had to pass the US Medical Licensing Exam so he wanted to polish his English.  For him, I was the mother lode.  Not only could I help him with his English, which was already very good, but I could hook him up with Erica (daughter #2 who just graduated from Columbia P&S), who had just taken the exam herself.  The only thing I couldn’t do was imitate a strong African American accent, which he’d heard was something he might be faced with in the simulated patient interviews.  I could offer Boston, more Brahmin than Southie, but that wasn’t likely something he’d need to deal with.   Over Christmas, when Erica was here, they discussed the exam and this past Spring he passed it.  Another success story.

The one tool that people most often suggest is the one that I haven’t used, intentionally so.  This is, of course, Paige.  Speaking with Paige in either German or Swiss German would be a sure fire means to accelerate the process.  The problem is, Lisa and I are Paige’s only opportunity to speak English and that's clearly more important than my German language hobby.    When you speak with her she sounds like a normal American kid but sometimes her phrases come out a bit “translated”.   We’re together at most a few hours in the evening each day so need to make this time count.   When we visit the US, we don’t want Paige to sound like an immigrant in her own country.  I'll keep plugging away but not at the expense of my daughter's future.