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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

Bah. I came here with about ten words. The only verb I could conjugate on the day I arrived was erschrecken, a couple of months later I did well already.

The key, and I think this applies to any language, is not NOT BACK DOWN. Some things will be hugely painful, if you back down you just defer the pain. The Germans will want to be polite and helpful (and practise their own English), don't let them.

Some HNers will know about the Israeli language courses after the war, when Israel had a seven-digit number of immigrants, hardly any of which spoke modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is an invented language, BTW, so "hardly any" is not an exaggeration. The model that worked was three-week full-time courses where ONLY modern Hebrew was spoken. They didn't let anyone back down: Students went without food until they were able to order in a restaurant where the waiters were helpful but spoke no foreign languages (usually late on the first day).

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> The key, and I think this applies to any language, is not NOT BACK DOWN. Some things will be hugely painful, if you back down you just defer the pain [...] don't let them

This is very stressful. Forcing an interlocutor to speak to you in their tongue when they know your language much better than you know theirs, is basically rude, and persistence with impoliteness is stress inducing for many people. I have personal experience of this in France where people would insist on speaking to me, stutteringly, in my native English when I speak perfect, fluent, French. Thus the OPs point about the language barrier being an issue, IMO is very valid.

I am not saying it is not possible and definitely total immersion helps and at some point you will learn the language but it is not easy to spend 9 hours at work where you speak English and after that go outside and immerse yourself to German for a few hours and do that every single day for at least a year.

> I am not saying it is not possible and definitely total immersion helps and at some point you will learn the language but it is not easy to spend 9 hours at work where you speak English

I'm pretty sure at work they understand German, too.

Yeah, that's the key. I studied in a Max Planck Institute in Germany. 80% of the students were international and spoke English, but I could always speak German to the remaining 20% and to faculty. Of course, we'd switch to English for technical discussion, but chit-chatting in German makes a difference.

Also, you can think in German at any time of the day.

> 80% of the students were international and spoke English, but I could always speak German to the remaining 20% and to faculty.

Even more: Of these 80% there are surely many that also would love to get better in German: Why not also agree to converse with them in German, too?

When I moved to Germany I got one native advice: "Speak English. If you speak broken German, everyone assumes you are an idiot and behave that way towards you. When you talk English, everybody tries to impress you." While I were in Germany it held...

Generally good advice when getting to know someone new that you want to like you. That said, you can always speak German to people you know or people whose opinion don't matter.

> "Speak English. If you speak broken German, everyone assumes you are an idiot and behave that way towards you. When you talk English, everybody tries to impress you."

While there is some small element of truth in it, this only holds if you are new in Germany (and mostly because of politeness). If you live there for a longer time and don't work on your German, it will turn the other way round.

Yes, this passive-aggressive approach from Germans is pretty common. Tolerating for a while and then forcing you to switch, and then putting you back into "idiot mode" as you both sound funny and can't express anything precisely (and don't even try to read legal documents, even Germans can't themselves). If Mark Twain couldn't learn it properly (read his story about the Museum of Curiosities in Heidelberg), how much chance do you stand? When you start studying German in depth, you are going to soon realize that it's an extremely illogical language despite initial appearances. There are so many idiomatic non-sensical ad-hoc rules, you'd have to learn an awful amount of exceptions that are used daily, you simply have little chance to catch up with the natives that consider them normal... Tja

My advice - if you really want to move abroad, move to the US, much less issues overall and English is way simpler up to C2 level (which gets super hard) and you can get a recognition and make a bank way easier.

> Tolerating for a while and then forcing you to switch, and then putting you back into "idiot mode" as you both sound funny and can't express anything precisely

That's not true. The typical German mentality is rather: They are/were willing to learn English to be able to communicate with you when you came. But now that you want to stay here for a longer time, you are expected you to learn German, too. So in other words: Some English speakers rather tend to confuse politeness (speaking English at the beginning to native English speakers when they are new to Germany) with acceptance (of having to speak in English to people that stay there for a longer time and are not willing to learn German).

Makes sense to me.

Obviously I was talking about people that achieved B2/C1 level of German but still couldn't "discuss Wittgenstein" with the natives, locking them out of proper interaction at their intelligence level, not about migrants that don't care about learning German at all.

My issue is having basically no accent (raised with German spoken around me), but the grammar and vocabulary of a ~2 year old. Makes for some really weird cognitive dissonance whenever I open my mouth to a German. I feel you on the "think you're an idiot" thing, definitely jives with my experience.

I think the primary challenge to learning a new language in the early stages is confronting this self-consciousness.

It's good training in not worrying too much about what other people think of you. What's the harm really in someone thinking you're an idiot? You know it's not the case.

Swallowing your pride speeds up learning immensely. You can even have fun with it--people will see you as funny and non-threatening, which can actually translate to likability quite easily if you don't get a chip on your shoulder about it.

Exactly. Additionally I want to point out that this is what many English speakers expect from foreigners.

Out of interest, whats its like studying at a MPI?

There are many MPIs across Germany. So, each one would have its own experience.

i know i may not be representative, but i am still interested in your experience.

The faculty were all rather nice to the students, and since it wasn't in a university, the 50 or so international students were a pretty tightly-knit group of people. They pushed a lot to finish the Ph.D. in 3/3.5 years, which is nice. Having so many experts in a specific scientific discipline concentrated in one place is pretty impressive, too.

My heart was elsewhere the whole time, so I'm not the best person to ask :P Germany itself was enjoyable, and I've met some fairly friendly Germans in WGs. It rains a lot in some places. YMMV, good luck!

Pretty sure your boss is paying you to program, and your coworker to program — not you to learn German and your coworker to teach German.

This depends on the company. Many Berlin tech companies have a very international staff, and English might be the only common language.

At least a year? You sound like the kind of person who couldn't diet to lose a few kilos.

My wife needed a few weeks to be able to speak Norwegian on a conversational level, I didn't need much more than that for German (difficult to count exactly due to travelblah). Once you reach conversational level the rest of the way has a different quality — you'll need to learn more but you've conquered the cliff, the rest is a modest incline.

A lot of individuals just don't feel comfortable speaking a language before they know it well enough. I definitely have a lot of respect for people that can just pick up a few basics and manage to always get their point across. But I just couldn't do it. I'm the kind of person that rehearses what they'll say in the most mundane situations. I'm uncomfortable when the plan doesn't work out.

Recently I even got complimented by a McD employee for telling them my rather lengthy order flawlessly without any need for interruption, made my day ;-D

So I'll risk the downvotes the parent got - massively, and say that he's got a point. You feel uncomfortable speaking the language at an early level? How.. horrible! Please do think about what you have written. Really. I don't even know what to say, it's just so silly.

Of course it's silly. As silly as being, say, shy is. Knowing that it doesn't stem from some rational evaluation or even realizing it hinders you is only the first step.

And btw I didn't downvote the parent. My point was mostly tangential rather than a counter argument.

At some point I accepted that my English is terrible (I'm German) and I decided to not waste any more energy on being embarrassed. Lo and behold, that was were my English really started to improve because I used it much more and also more intuitively. Previously, I first constructed every sentence in my head before uttering it. That works to some extent but it prevents you from developing an intuitive understanding of the language. So my advice is: don't make your life harder than necessary, speak without thinking, you will make plenty of mistakes, but people will think you are cute. More generally, If you show your weakness in life, people usually react very positively.

> My wife needed a few weeks to be able to speak Norwegian on a conversational level, I didn't need much more than that for German (difficult to count exactly due to travelblah).

You guys must be both geniuses. Either that or those "learn X language in 14 days!" books actually work.

Can you elaborate on modern Hebrew being an "invented language"? This is the first time I have heard this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language#Revival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

Just to add to that, "invented" might give the wrong idea. "Revival" is more accurate. It wasn't used in the day to day, and making it useful that way took some work. But it wasn't invented from nothing.

In particular, if you know modern Hebrew, you can mostly read the ancient Hebrew in the bible, which shows it is not truly a new language.

> Just to add to that, "invented" might give the wrong idea. "Revival" is more accurate.

To quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hebrew_language&o...

"The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along the 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew. New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) and older Aramaic and Latin. Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French."

In this sense "invented" is not completely wrong.

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