More thoughts on learning German

Apparently this has been my theme this week. ;-) A few of you had some interesting comments on this theme. To summarize my general thoughts:

Why now after five years?

In that class the other day, I was reading aloud and the very nice teacher was gauging my spoken skills. 'Halt!' Then she says, 'you said German word, which is ok, that's how they say it in Hamburg, but a better way to say it in our corner of NRW is ...' I love 'teacher speak' and how they don't want to be discouraging.

However, I saw the point, my random pronunciation of that one threw off the overall effect of the entire sentence. I imagine it must be something I picked up from TV. Or that I heard it somewhere else and picked up the softer pronunciation of said word (my favorite and regular Berlitz teacher was from Hamburg), rather than the stronger NRW guttural version. I feel that I have a lot of tiny things of this type, and that a small amount of effort would give good returns. (As opposed to when I first got here and couldn't string together a sentence with any word with appropriate pronunciation, and all effort produced slow results.)

I don't imagine I'll be here another five years to allow for the general passive acquisition that has served me well thus far, so it's move it or lose it time. For some reason, hitting the five year point seems to have been a milestone after the fact. When I speak Spanish, I can go months and pick up immediately where I left off. My German isn't strong enough yet to do that, and if I don't get a stronger foundation in place, if I were to leave Germany tomorrow, I'd lose it completely, in a matter of a few years. I feel that would be an absolute waste of my time/effort here personally that I did already put into learning it, as well as a professional waste, as it is a marketable skill.

Had I known I was going to be here this long, I probably would have sucked it up long ago and got on the bandwagen. This was originally supposed to be a three month stint, then it became just one year, then onto two, and so it goes and here we are on an unlimited German contract. However, not having a German significant other to turn me into a lifer, I do have some sort of shelf life here, or so I suspect. Thus no lofty goals to read Goethe in the original or needing the language to be promoted or anything of that nature. More that from a common sense, practical perspective, the time seems right.