Hello!
My name is Tasha, I also go by Tash, and I am a Junior at Concordia. I am a double major in German & Heritage and Museum Studies, I am also minoring in international affairs. Ideally, as soon as I am able to I will be able to move permanently to Germany while continuing to pursue work in the field of museums and heritage institutions.
I fear I may become a bit of broken record when it comes to Germany and the German language, but I am very passionate in it so I hope it will not be too cliche. More generally however, I am exceedingly interested in other languages and cultures and I would like to try to attain basic lingual skills/fluency in at least 5 languages by the time I am around 50 to 60 years old. But I do have to say I am plagued by the problem of starting a language for a few months, stopping, and starting a new one. So, I have begun to try to learn Korean, Swedish, and Dutch in the past, but my current lingual obsession is Yiddish, we will see how long this one lasts, but it is pretty fun so far. I took about 2 years of French about 4 years ago, so that remains rough, but I plan to return to it one day. A few languages also in my purview are Arabic or Turkish and Hebrew, but again we will see how far I get as a serial language learner hopper.
As far as German goes I have been learning it for around 8 years and have lived in Germany altogether in two different trips for a little more than a year. I try my best to integrate the language into my everyday life and maintain several connections allowing me to speak it a little daily beyond my studies. So if you have ever wanted German music recommendations, I am your girl! But that also brings me to the title of my blog post which is a saying in German, “Aller Anfang ist Schwer.” Describing that you should never be too hard on yourself when you are just starting something because every start is not meant to be easy, I thought this was fitting.
Now for the more technical parts of this post, I am taking this course namely for a requirement as an HMS major, but additionally I think this course will be useful and interesting to me as someone wishing to work in heritage and museum institutions. I would say I have a lot of unrefined experience, but I have a strong willingness to polish this experience.
So far this course has pleasantly met or even exceeded my expectations. I find my colleagues fonts of knowledge in which the discussion is interesting, varied, and generally all-encompassing. I find the articles all have a fair breadth, but are occasionally a bit, admittedly dated. I would love more video or visual integrations, but I understand there are a fair number of limits and that it is early so on so we will become more hands-on as well, so I am looking forward to this.
A few of my own questions… have any of you guys ever been out of the country? Do you speak another language? I am also curious, as a German major, what your initial thoughts or stereotypes on German culture and language are.
Happy Blogging,
Tash
I am also a serial language starter! I know some basic phrases in Spanish, French, ASL, and Chinese. I also started Gaelic in December. It’s nice to meet you!
Hi Zara,
Very cool! What type of Gaelic?
I also relate to you in terms of fluency in a language, as I think I am a bit fluent (although still struggling) in Spanish. My entire family speaks fluent Spanish except for me, so I started to actually learn it back in 7th grade. At least I can handle basic conversation, but I would really like to improve more so that I can communicate better with the family I have in Mexico. I don’t really know much about German culture and language, but I’ve mostly seen memes of Germans having long and weird sounding words for certain things (I will admit that some words in German legit make me laugh though, as bad as it sounds).
Thank you for the comment Belem,
Yeah Spanish is especially hard as so many completely different dialects and accents exist. What is considered perfect Spanish to one person, can be somewhat alien to another Spanish speaker.
As for the additions on German, that’s pretty normal, and it isn’t bad at all, like sometimes when I do not know a specific name for something, you can kind of just bunch together several words describing that thing into one word and you have a 50-50 chance that you will be correct, compound words in German are just a lot more common, so something like the word, cupcake in English, is pretty normal, for example: Busfahrer in German = Bus Driver, in English.
I’m curious to see what application you use to study so many languages at once: Duolingo? Babbel? Rosetta Stone? A bunch of books? I, too, used to speak French really well but have since let it atrophy in recent years, though I believe I can still read French just as well as during my senior year of high school. However, my French knowledge wasn’t put to use for the only time I traveled outside the U.S., which was to Australia. I would like to know which languages you find the easiest and which you find the hardest to master.
Hi Tasha, I really enjoyed reading your post! I recently studied abroad in Australia, and some of my best friends I met there were from Germany. Like you, I found their culture very intriguing, and they even taught me how to count to ten in German. It is inspiring how ambitious you are to learn so many languages. I am very excited for you as you plan to move abroad. Over the years I have learned that traveling to different countries is the best way to learn and grow as a person!
Hi Tasha,
I loved reading your post and it is so cool how interested you are in learning different languages. I love the idea of knowing/understanding multiple languages but only know English. I took Spanish for three years, so I understand the basics, but could not hold a conversation. What was your favorite part about your time in Germany? Do you hope to move there more permanently?