The Inspiration of Getting to Know a New Language-German

German, as one of foreign languages which I had never acquired, recently becomes my first priority in my language-assessing course. My first impression to German was ”Guten Tag”, a simple sentence, which is the most basic and commonly used anpronunciation of that, everything seems to be mysterios for me. When I heard about how German is difficult to acquire from a friend of mine, the idea of getting to know that language disappears. What’s worse, I listed various languages in consideration, such as Thai, Spainsh, or French, but choosing to abandon German. The opportunity to get closer to German must be an accident, or I can say perhaps destiny, the thing which I cannot escape.

To “construct” a new learning experience, I must start with the fundamentalist process step by step. That is, to understand more about the language, building up myself more first impression instead of the only sentence “Guten Tag”. In order to estabilsh my concept toward German, I have to start from the alphabet and the structure, knowing what German looks like. Thanks to my partner, what I mean is in a positive way, she just sent me two link to videos which introduce German alphabets and grammar. This action absolutely gave me some ideas to start, preventing me from losing direction over and over again.

Although I am already a 21-year- old senior student, I am such a little child in learning a new language, just like a girl stay in the kindergarten. Therefore, I must be accustomed to the sound of German (i.e.phonetics) so that I won’t be confused about what it sounds like. For instance, I begin to listen to German alphabet via a video which is designed for kids, the nursey rhyme “little star” is the based rhyme in the video. Even if I am still not familiar with pronunciations totally, I realize that there’s a differnence between English and German.

After knowing more about the sound, my next step is to venture grammar/syntax of German. In the begeinning, I still felt messing up when seeing the words changing in multiple ways. That totally droves me crazy because I could not know what will the presenter do next, and it also confused me. In order to improve such situation, I resume the video for over three times, all I want to do is to find out what is going on now. This part broadens definely broadens my horizen of syntax. Here are two tricky points which surprised me so much during the video: First, the structure of German sentences is the same as English. Second, German is more flexible than English. We all know that the structure of English is SVO. (subject+ verb+ object) Nonetheless, how can German be “flexible”? Flexible denotes changeable here in my point of view; that is I am able to change word order without alternating the core meaning of the whole sentence. Take the sentence ”She sees the boy everyday” for example, the core meaning will change in English if the sentence becomes “The boy sees she everyday.” Conversely, the core meaning won’t disappear if I change the order of “the boy” and “she” in German. The way to express German syntax can be two different choices, that’s why I say German is flexible.