Studying a foreign language in a foriegn country (Specifically German)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m looking for advice about studying a foreign language in a foreign country. Specifically I am interested in German in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. I took four years of German in high school and did fairly well. However, that was 6 years ago and much of my knowledge is dormant. I’m looking to do about a two month stay from the beginning of August until the end of September. I see three general options available:

(1) University/Formal Program staying with other students in a dorm type situation

(2) University/Formal Program while staying in a homestay

(3) Private tutor and homestay

(1) would be the easiest to organize, but would likely be the most expensive as well. I am a little bit leery that it would also end up being the least rewarding in terms of language development. The fear I have is that it would be a large class, not necessarily tailored to me, and that other students and I would reinforce each others poor habits.

(2) Has the benefit of being easy to organize and would be in the middle in terms of expense. The fear in terms of language development is the same as (1), but at least I have a very high chance of getting something reasonably good. It’s true that a program might not be tailored, but it is also unlikely to be an unmitigated disaster. Most likely it would fall somewhere in the good to ok range. A homestay would likely reduce the cost a bit and provide a better window into the culture.

(3) would be the most difficult to organize, but likely would be the least expensive and most rewarding. A private tutor would be able to tailor a program, while the homestay would be the best cultural experience.

I’d appreciate any comments anyone would like to make regarding their experiences.

In addition I’m trying to figure out where exactly I would like to go. I really love mountains and would like to live by them. Think the Sound of Music type setting. I’m of two minds about City vs. Town/Village. A city would provide me with more stuff to do, and more potential interactions with locals to improve my languages. The downside would be that everyone would want to show off/practice their English with me. A village would provide fewer, but likely more long term interactions with locals. That might cause them to be more amenable to allowing me to use my broken German. Any ideas would appreciated.

If any doper wants to be a host, that would be really cool too! :cool:

2

A few years ago, the company I worked for sent me to work at a branch in Nürnberg for three months. While I was there, I signed up for a German class that met two evenings per week. There were only six or seven students, and we didn’t have any language in common so the whole class had to be in German. It was great, I had a good time and learned a lot (and the teacher was kinda cute).

It sounds like you want a more intensive experience than just two evenings a week, but I can send you the name of the company if you want to check them out.

As for mountains, you might like southern Germany. I was a tourist, so I only really know about touristy places, but most folk’s English is good enough that they don’t need to show it off or practice. If you start a conversation in German, you’ll have plenty of chances to use it.[sup]*[/sup] And for me, it was nice to know I could fall back to English so I wouldn’t starve to death or anything.

  • One benefit to a small town might be that people won’t be quite as rushed. I tried speaking German at a fast food type place, and it felt like I was slowing things down a bit. The pressure was to switch to English just to keep things moving along.
3

I did study abroad in Ecuador, the land of Spanish language schools, and based on my own experience and those of other people I met, I would recommend the homestay. The families should be told to not speak English with you unless it’s absolutely necessary. That’s how it was for us and I’d assume that protocol would hold worldwide, although of course you can check with whatever homestay programs you are looking at. The family knows they’ll need to be patient while you pick up the language, and they shouldn’t mind otherwise they wouldn’t be hosting language-school students. But in a dorm people aren’t obligated to speak German with you, they didn’t sign a contract. And if there are more than a few other Americans then you’ll have to actively try to avoid English conversation at every turn. [That said, I defer to anyone who did this sort of program and stayed in a dorm, college housing is uncommon in Lat. Am so homestays were the only option for us.]

Personally I don’t see the need for a private tutor, I think you could get the same benefit from a good school with small classes. The classes will give you grammar and writing and some speaking practice, and then you’ll have the rest of the day to fit in as much talk time as you can. They always say that to learn a language you just need to talk, talk, talk, and you don’t need constant correction while you’re talking, you just need someone who can keep up a conversation.

So in sum: do whatever arrangement will give you the most speaking practice. Which I would guess is (2) but it will depend on the specifics.

4

Before I moved to Germany, I had had one year of high school German, and again, one year of college German. Needless to say, my knowledge of the language was limited.
However, I simply lived in areas that didn’t have a lot of people who spoke English and it is amazing how quickly you learn when you HAVE TO!
The people were very nice - from the baker to the the bartender at the local pub - they all made me speak in full sentences and corrected my German.

I like to say it took me about 3 months before I understood what they were saying, but another three months before I could make myself understood. That was a frustrating “middle period”, as I knew what they were saying, but couldn’t reply. I felt like a 5 year old and it was frustrating as they would almost talk to me in baby language. I remember in about month two, some guy turned to his dog and said something, and suddenly the dog got up and went to the door and lay down there. I thought, “Great, the damned German Shepard understands more German than I do!”

However, after about 6 months, I was pretty good - and by the end of the first year, I was good enough that people stopped mistaking me for an American - granted, they thought I was Dutch, but hey - at least my German was good enough to sound like someone from a neighboring country!

So, my vote is to go - try to find a job teaching English or whatever - park your butt down somewhere away from the touristy areas where more people speak English, and just immerse yourself. It works, is fun and I can’t think of a better way to learn both the language and the culture/customs!

Viel Spass!

5

Yeah actually I would agree with DMark, it wasn’t one of the option in the OP so it didn’t occur to me at the time. But if you got to year 4 in high school, and your classes were fairly comprehensive (you got up to reading stories and short novels), then you’ve probably seen everything they would cover in the classroom.

In fact my boyfriend has a relative who they’ve been talking on-and-off about bringing over from Poland for the summer, to take English classes here. AIUI he’s been taking it in school for years and knows it pretty well. So I’ve keep saying they should skip the English classes and just send him to a kids camp for the summer to volunteer. Or have him work at a food pantry, or just send him down to the bar every night (they didn’t like the last one so much). But if you can find some similar arrangement then I would definitely give that serious consideration.

6

I took four years of high school German a really, really long time ago. Like before-Reagan-was-President-long-ago. Then I moved to Germany in 1998. Almost 20 years will make you quite rusty, but I think that six years shouldn’t be too long. And if you’re only six years out of high school you’re still young enough to pick up language relatively quickly.

For the past 18 months I’ve been spending about 50% of my time in Germany, in a small town not far from Stuttgart. I’ve learned that many Germans speak English, but many more don’t. Maybe they studied it, but it also sort of went away for them after school, or they were lousy students. So you should get plenty of opportunities to speak German whether you want to or not.

If it were my choice, I would either pick a decent sized city, or a place near a decent sized city. Easier to get around because the public transport will be better is one reason. Cologne and Munich are both pretty fun cities. Munich is close by mountains, but… beware dialects and thick accents. The German spoken in every city will vary, but some of the variations are tougher to work out. Thick Schwabian and Bavarian accents are about the toughest for me, personally, especially when spoken by older men with deep voice. I just lose the distinction of words in the low guttural tones.

Still, I think the prettiest parts of Germany are down in the South and then along the Rhine river north of Mainz. Oh, my friends from Freiburg think it’s the best city in the world, although it might be a little isolated and I’m not sure how much French stuff creeps into their German. Swiss German is not anything like your high school German. Austrian German varies a lot by location, but Austria seems like quite a nice place, mostly.

Once you’re here, I’d suggest, if you watch TV, try to watch shows that were actually recorded in German. The dubbed stuff is a bit maddening when trying to follow along. Get a native German speaking girlfriend or boyfriend as appropriate; I’ve heard that really expedites the process. If you find someone who will engage you in German, try very hard to stay in German except where you really have no clue how to express a thought in German. And then ask if they know the German word for what you just said.

When you go to a shop or new place, explain that your German isn’t that great, but that you’d like to try to use it. I find many Germans are especially surprised to meet Americans who can speak some German, so they like to try and help. It probably helps that I kind of look German, so most people assume I can speak German. Then they ask me for directions.

Finally, whether you want them to or not, Germans will correct your German all of the time. I don’t think that they even realize that they’re doing this. I notice this most with the articles which I often mess up.

7

Thanks for all of the responses, they were all very helpful. Can anyone talk a little bit more about accents? I’d feel like an ass if I went somewhere for two months and came out talking like Boomhower from King of the Hill.

ShibbOleth, Freiburg looks pretty interesting, but as you note its pretty close to France and Switzerland. Can you ask your friends about the accents from that area?

8

I just wanted to mention something that I discovered (to my chagrin and your benefit): unlike (say) francophone Quebecers, Germans will not switch into English, no matter how bad your German is, unless you specifically ask them to. So I constantly found myself attempting German (as it would be rude, from my Quebec perspective, to just start in English) and subconsciously expecting them to switch, but then they didn’t, and talked a mile a minute until I broke down and embarrassedly asked them if they spoke English.

I asked about it at one point, and was told, “Oh, it would be rude to switch to English! It would be like saying your German wasn’t good enough!” I was like, I already know my German isn’t good enough. But this way you’ll have the benefit of people who are determined to speak to you in German. I wasn’t even studying, and by the time I left Austria I was able to hold a conversation about travelling and Canadian geography in (halting, approximate, but complete-sentence) German with the nice older couple sharing the train compartment with me.

9

Gigantic and threatening, the accents and dialects towered mountainously over Munich. :smiley:

To the OP, don’t forget you can watch German TV right now thanks to the Internet. Zweiter Deutscher Rundfunk has quite a lot of content online–news, drama, and documentaries–and many if not most were created and produced in German.

10

They’ll probably tell me that there is no accent there; the rest of Germany has an accent. :slight_smile:

Seriously, though, I don’t have too much trouble understanding their German, but I don’t know if they’re “cleaning up” their speech since we’re in the other part of Baden-Württemberg. I’ll ask.

One other thing, I find this website (http://www.dict.cc/) very, very helpful. It works decently on a BlackBerry, so I can use it surreptitiously when I’m out. I bought a nice, thick German-English Oxford dictionary, but it doesn’t contain all of the subtleties you find in real daily speech. Plus, English <> American English, especially when it comes to stuff like fish. For example, what the hell is “John Dory”?* I have to translate menu items a lot for my colleagues, and fish is the biggest pain, because we often don’t have the same fishes or call them the same names.

*John Dory is a fish that, afaik, we don’t really get in the USA. It’s called Petersfisch in Germany.

11

After four years of high school German (and a couple of years of essentially worthless college German), I did two months at a Goethe Institut in Germany (before heading off to the University of Vienna). Just being in Germany for two months vastly improved my German, and of course being in a German-language-only classroom for several hours a day helped also. You are correct to worry about being in a dorm with other students, although perhaps for a different reason–the lingua franca around the dorm was generally English, as that was the language everyone spoke best. (The Goethe Institut caters to people with a wide range of fluencies, so a lot of people didn’t have much German.)

Making yourself go out and about, and interacting with the locals helps. Before running an errand, I would often look up the handful of extra words I would need to accomplish that errand, and then employ them on that errand; then I would know them (and have accomplished some shopping, or something else useful, to boot).

I wouldn’t worry too much about accent/dialect issues. My experience was that people would make an effort to speak Hochdeutsch to me, so my German was only minimally corrupted by spending two months in Bavaria (and slightly more corrupted by spending 9 months in Vienna). Having instructors speaking formal German to me all the time probably served as a good corrective.

12

Regarding accents; in my humble opinion it breaks down similarly to the US.

Hamburg/Berlin would be about the same as “standard” Chicago/Midwest accent. Granted, there is a working class Berlin dialect that would be similar to the heavy New York accent, but for the most part, these areas speak standard Hochdeutsch.

The further south in Germany you go, the more “southern USA” dialect similarities start entering. Munich speaks a dialect that would be like someone from Atlanta, Georgia (Miss Scarlet) - and of course the Germans in the northern parts snicker at those accents. (Oddly, the politics is geographically the same as in the US as well - the southern parts of Germany are traditionally far more conservative than northern Germany.)

Austria is even more so - think Alabama backwoods.

And regarding the German spoken in Switzerland, well…that is so off-the-wall it even has a name: Zwitscherdeutsch. Almost impossible for even most Germans to understand - it has a rhythm that goes up and down (like the Alps) and even has different words and phrases unknown outside of Switzerland.

13

Just avoid the following, which actually happened to me. Spending a year visiting at the ETH in Zuerich, I signed up for a German course, taught a couple nights a week. We were supposed to be taught entirely in German since we were a diverse group without a language in common. The teacher was a well-known Swiss short story writer (Adolph Muschg). He discovered quite soon that we all did speak English and spent most the class time telling stories, in English. He was a hell of a nice guy and the class was thoroughly enjoyable. But I learned no German.

14

I have no experience with German (other than one of my best friends did her first masters degree in Switzerland and regularly mocks Swiss German for sounding hideous), but I did a homestay language immersion thing in Bulgarian and I just want to say that if you can live with kids, do it. I learned a ridiculous amount of Bulgarian from my seven year old host niece. Her level of conversation was just about what I could handle. She didn’t want to talk about politics or what careers I was interested in, she was more about asking me my favorite color or do I like french fries and did I want to play a game with her. She also found it hilarious that she knew more Bulgarian than an actual grown up and took the job of teaching me new words very seriously. (I learned all of the “items that go in the kitchen” words from her, for example.)

15

I got a chance to file a police report in German today; that was pretty interesting and a bit of a stretch for me at times. Not a recommended way to improve your language skills, though. :slight_smile:

16

I am not a German speaker, but I have worked there for extended periods (on a multi-national team that used English).

I was, however, trained by the US Army in French and the best course I ever took was one that taught me French Phonetics - that went a long way towards eliminating my American accent when speaking French. I’m sure you can find the same in Germany - just make sure you are learning ‘High German’ phonetics or you’ll end up with a regional German accent.

17

So lets see, no police reports and classes from Swiss authors. Check
Talk to Children, double check.

It sounds like at least a few of you live or spent time in Germany. Any particular favorite cities you think I should look at?

18

Well, my ticket is booked and I am arriving in Berlin on the 8th of July. Still have little idea where I am going to live, but I’m thinking it should be fairly straight forward to find a shared apartment somewhere. Still open to suggestions as to which city I should end up in.

19

I am somewhat biased, having lived in Berlin 14 years - but why would you leave Berlin if you are already going to land there?

Rents have gone way down since the Wall tumbled, so affordable housing should be no problem.
One of the schools where I used to teach is Akademie Fuer Fremdsprachen which is a fairly inexpensive, good, private language school in a nice location. You could take an intensive course there for not a lot of money and even get a certificate if you wished to go that route.
Plus, what’s not to like about Berlin?
Great nightlife, great museums and art galleries, lots of palaces and historical architecture, amazing shows and concerts, excellent public transportation system, wide choice of restaurants and shopping - plus, Berlin has lots of woods and parks and lakes and rivers - just about everything you would want and need.

However, wherever you decide to go - keep us posted!
Viel Spass!

Oops - here is the link to the school in English: Akademie für Fremdsprachen GmbH - private Fachschule -

20

I don’t have any animosity towards Berlin. I just don’t know if that big of a city with so many tourists would be as conducive to learning as a smaller city. Just a general feeling that Berliners would have the standoffish attitude of a New Yorkers, instead of Midwestern hospitality of, say, Milwaukee. That’s probably a misestimation, and I get the feeling that finding the best WG situation is more important than the city.