Back to Language Class

Published on 3 Feb 2025

Last week I finished my third run at taking language classes in Germany. This attempt was 5 months of 3 nights a week with each of those nights having 3 hours of class. The two main takeaways I have of the class, aside from the German itself, are that I terribly miss the feeling of inclusivity that being a student in a class provides, and that I am getting better at learning languages. Before I further discuss these points I'll provide some more context about the class itself. It was a B2 level class followed by a shortened "crash-course" C1. The B2 class had 11 people, and the C1 8 people, with the majority of the C1 class carrying over from B2. The demographics this time were more spread out then my previous classes. Ages ranged from 14-50 and at most two people came from the same country, although English was still the de-facto "middle" language. To maybe preface the coming positive revelations, I'd also note that the teacher was simply superb. I am yet to have a bad teacher in my entire time here, but this one put the others to shame. Her ability to describe complex grammatical structures and openness on their everyday equivalents was fantastic. The true genius, however, was the constantly running group conversations that got everybody comfortable, and the open offer to read and correct anything that you wrote. Now to discuss the takeaways!

I am reasonably confident that I am not alone these days in feeling a lack of community engagement and third places. The resulting feeling is not loneliness, and does not stem from an excess or lack of free time, but rather some barrier exists that makes meeting new people outside of my bubble more difficult than it used to be, and for me that limits the groups that I meaningfully interact with. This isn't in general a problem. I am very happy with my bubble. It is filled with people I care about and who I am incredibly grateful to have met. For the most part, however, I do not find myself working together as part of a group outside of a work context. I apparently greatly miss this. The combination of taking on a challenging task, e.g., learning a new language, for which I can feel myself finally climbing out of a plateau, and being surrounded by interesting people with similar goals, was lovely. The fun classroom dynamic, laughing at idiotic jokes, actively learning together without a need for competition, and feeling a bit like a kid again, made the three hours each evening pass extremely quickly. I did not have this feeling with my other classes. It might simply have been that back then I was younger and less confident in speaking up and approaching people, or that I got lucky with my classmates this time (extremely likely), but this experience was extremely rewarding. It has strengthened my opinion that such an activity is good for me, and that I should more actively engage in such things. I also feel like it filled in the original gap I mentioned, in that I was no longer missing a third place or feeling disconnected from the community for those 5 months. I hope to keep in contact with some people from the class, which involves actually initiative of reaching out, a skill that I at least no longer consider myself completely god awful at. I'd also like to add an added boon that I had for those 5 months. Without fail, I slept beautifully each night. That alone justifies the money spent, even if disregarding the entire overwhelmingly positive experience. I will greatly miss having those classes.

Moving on to a less conflicted topic, I can confidently say that I am better at German! Aside from my first few months in Germany, I have never noticed such a fast improvement in my language abilities. I could discount this as simply years of osmosis and language ability leeching into my latent memory, waiting for me to actively sit down and put in some tiny modicum of effort again, but I like to believe that I have just gotten better at knowing how to learn a language. I guess those two reasons are essentially the same...... I promise there's a difference in their meaning! I feel much more comfortable now acknowledging what parts of the language I am weak at (vocab), and what exact things I need to do improve, e.g., write stories with words I struggle to remember because then they do get remembered. I probably could have written this part of the post before taking the class, but my actual confidence would have been non-existent on the claims. The biggest, and most difficult realisation, is that a class like I had is the single best way for me to learn a language, and it is something I cannot force to exist as it is reliant on the situation of others. I hope, however, that I have finally built up enough momentum to pass from functional to actually fluent by myself. If there's more German content on this website then I would say that there's clear evidence that I succeeded.