I had a dumb day.

Some days are better than others. In this case I'm not so much referring to how my day was in it's entirety, but how good my German was. Some days are good/smart feeling days. Like last week, I had a great day when I called my specialist doctor's office, made an appointment and understood that I needed to bring a referral and not take my medication on appointment day (okay, I didn't know the word for referral-Überweisung- off the top of my head, but I understood well enough to spell it properly then look it up). Further, I was able to call my primary care doctor's office and request the referral and a medication refill.

Today was not one of those days. Nothing terrible happened per-say, I just made mistakes in my homework for my class, and made a few mistakes identifying case in class as well. It is a really strange feeling when you learn a new language in this way.

When you learn a language in a class in high school, you typically get the feeling that you are constantly building. You learn new words, you take tests and pass them, and you read gradually more complex texts. Its a very different thing to be an Ausländerin (foreigner) where you must conduct your daily life in another language that you didn't really know before you moved.

When we first moved here I would often defer to my husband (I still make him call offices for me sometimes). Lately however, he is getting more and more busy with work and I am trying to solidify myself and create my own life here. So that means I'm trying to make the appointments for the kids, write to friends parents, and talk to the teachers in a language that I am still learning.

I am currently taking an A2 course through the migration center. I am the only native English speaker in my class, though my teacher lived in Canada for a few years and is exceptionally fluent in English, the class is taught in German. Sometimes the other students will remark that I have a leg up because there are many similar words in English and German, and I am fairly good at the pronouncing German correctly:though German does have a lot of different sounds than English (e.g. ch,ü, ö) and they pronounce the same letters differently ( e.g. s at the beginning of a word followed by a vowel is pronounced z, and z is ts). However, there are also so many "false friends" i.e. words that look or sound like English words, but are not actually related. Furthermore, English really doesn't have a case system, and German has 4 cases which it something that I struggle with, partially because to correctly do the case with the definite article, one must in fact know what the definite article is: die, der, or das. They also treat verb placement differently and have these very confusing things called trenbarr verbs. So the verb anrufen is to call (on the telephone) but in a sentence you would say Wir rufen Max an. We call Max. That was an extremely short sentence, try imagining a very long sentence where part of the verb is at the beginning, and then there is all sorts of other information before you get the other part of the verb. It gets tricky! Forming them myself isn't so hard, but listening and understanding others speaking can be made difficult with these separable verbs. I suppose that is a rather long explanation to say that: German is hard-even though English is a "Germanic" language.

It can be a curious tumult of emotions from one day, or one hour to the next. Not that my entire being is run by my feelings of proficiency, or lack thereof, but it can certainly be humbling. One day I'm starting to feel like I've really got the hang of this language and I'm well on my way to fluency, and the next I make 30 dumb errors and feel like I will never even be able to pass a B1 exam, forget about getting to fluency high enough to go to school here or work in a job where regular interaction with natives is required. I suppose that is a common feeling. When I have bad days I try to remember my progress, and that it has been steady, and likely will continue to be so as long as I continue to apply myself, and frankly, be willing to make myself uncomfortable sometimes (going out alone where I have to communicate on my own) and to sometimes sound stupid, because if I don't push myself to speak (and allow correction with humility) I will never acquire the fluency I desire.