In 2001 I was in the 9th grade. In my high school there was only one option for students
who wanted to learn a foreign language, German. Spanish was not taught at my school.
I am thankful everyday that I had to learn German. Otherwise I wouldn’t
have taken part in our short-term exchange program. Then I wouldn’t have
continued learning German at the university. Maybe I would have taught chemistry. I don’t know
how differently my life would have gone if I didn’t learn German, but today I am going to tell you
why, how, where and how long I learned German. This is my German learning story.
If you are a member of my Deutschlerner Club, you can get a copy of this video script
in German and in English side-by-side
along with a worksheet and answer key. Plus you will get access to a bonus video that is exclusively made
for those members and can't be found anywhere else on the internet. Join via the link in the description.
As I said, in my high school there was only German as a foreign language. No
Spanish. No French. Only German. You couldn’t learn a foreign language in the 9th grade.
You had to wait until you were in the 10th grade. There were
two options. You could either learn German or art. I can barely
write. My handwriting looks terrible and if I draw or paint something, it looks
even worse than my handwriting. I chose German.
In the 10th grade I started with German. Dr. Christiane Eydt-Beebe
was my German teacher. I don’t remember anymore about the class hours or how
or what we learned. I only remember that it was fun
to be in this classroom. I thought the German language was interesting. And it was
also fun, if I could say something at home that my parents didn’t understand.
In this school there was also a very special program. It is called “GAPP”,
German American Partnership Program. Every two years we had a visit
from exchange students from a Gymnasium (school for university-bound students). Then in the
summer the American students visited their exchange partners in Germany.
When I was in the 11th grade, I took part in this program. For two weeks I was
a host for a boy from Breitungen, a small city near Erfurt in Thuringia.
He took part in my classes. We spoke a little German with each other. The
entire group took a few field trips. We visited Cahokia Mounds near St.
Louis and the Amish near Arcola, Illinois. It was a lot of fun.
In the summer between the 11th and 12th grades, I traveled with this group to Germany.
We spent two weeks with our German partner students. We visited their
school and many tourist sites in the area. On one special weekend we
traveled to Berlin. We spent a few days there. The tour with the bus
was too fast and we couldn’t see anything. The tour guide didn’t say anything
when we drove past tourist sites.
After the two weeks at our partners school we said
farewell to our friends. The other American students and I traveled
to Wiesbaden. There we stayed in a youth hostel. We took
a boat ride on the Rhine river, saw the Loreley rock and the Deutsche Eck (German corner in Koblenz, Germany).
A year later I graduated from high school and started studying at Eastern
Illinois University. I got good grades in Chemistry in school
and thought I wanted to become a chemistry teacher. Therefore I took a chemistry course.
I also wanted to learn some more German, which is why I took a German course.
At the end of my first year at the university I had good grades in German and
mediocre grades in Chemistry. I changed my major and learned more German.
I learned a lot from my courses at the university. First I was in a German class for
second year students, because I had already taken three years of German in high school.
But in the first week, the professor said to me, that I was probably not suited
for this class, because I could already speak German better than the other
students in the class. She recommended that I take a German class at a higher level.
Since I started my first year at the university taking classes from the third year,
I was able to learn from many special courses. My favorite course was a German film course.
Once a week we watched a film. Later in the week we
discussed the film and wrote an essay about the film. We saw very old films
and also very new films. We watched parts of “Die Nibelungen” from 1924
and the entire film with the same name from 1966. Other films include:
M, Bandits, Stalingrad, Hui Buh (like Casper, but German), Impy's Island, or Urmel from the Ice Age,
The Bridge, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How violence develops and where it can lead, Good-Bye Lenin, Sissi, The Young Empress
and Lissi and the Wild Emperor. I have linked the trailers for these films in the description.
Although I learned a lot from my courses at the university, I learned a lot more from
our Stammtisch (Regulars Table). Every week German speakers from the area went to
a cafe in the city. There we spoke German. Sometimes
30 minutes. Sometimes 3 hours. There were professors, students, and native speakers from
the area there. We talked about the university, politics, climate change or whatever
was floating around in our heads. Stammtisch was the best part about my time at the university.
While I studied at the university, I still lived at my
parents’ house. My family was a host for a girl from Hannover.
We often spoke with one another in German. She stayed with us for a year.
After four years I graduated from the university. A
few months before graduation, the university had a job fair. A
woman from Edwardsville school district invited me to an interview.
A few weeks later, I completed the interview and
got the position. I was supposed to teach German 1 and 2 at Edwardsville High School.
Before graduation I applied for a grant from Deutschen Akademischen
Austauschdienst (DAAD). Surprisingly I got the grant. With the grant
I paid for a summer course at Humboldt University in Berlin. My grandma
gave me the tickets to Germany and back. I only had to pay for my food.
In Berlin I learned German eight hours a day. Then I learned more German
outside of the university. Every day we had lessons from nine until twelve. After our
lunch break we took a tour, visited a few tourist sites
or went to the theater. We were 33 students from 18 countries. We
had a lot of fun. Almost every night we were in a club. We danced and played.
On the first weekend, my exchange partner from our GAPP trip visited me in Berlin.
He brought his girlfriend with him and she asked
a friend in Berlin if she could show us a few tourist sites. We walked around in Berlin for almost the entire day
on Saturday. Then on Sunday the university group spent almost the entire day
near a lake outside of the city and my exchange partner drove home.
On the next weekend, I visited him in his city. It was fun
to see his entire family and friends from school again. There was a medieval market
nearby. We visited that of course. It wasn’t much fun,
because there weren’t very many stands open and not very many people were there.
I had to take a photo with the donkey man. Then we drove on.
One of the highlights of my first trip to Germany was a visit to the Wasserkuppe.
In 2009 I visited it again. On this mountain there is a lot
to do. There is an Alpine rollercoaster, a climbing forest and a memorial to pilots. If you
would like to learn more about this area, Rewboss has an excellent video about it.
After this time with my host brother, I traveled to Hannover. There I
visited the young lady who once lived at my parents’ house. We saw a few
tourist sites and reminisced about the time in the USA.
I stayed in Berlin for another two weeks. After that I traveled back to America and a
few months later I started teaching German at Edwardsville High School.
Since 2009 I have taught German 1 and 2 at this school. Since 2011
I have been making videos for this YouTube channel. I am still learning German.
My German is not perfect. No one really speaks perfect German. I
don’t even speak perfect English and I have been speaking English since 1987. I hope
my story inspires you. I can learn German. You can learn German.
That is all for today. Thanks for watching. Until next time. Bye.