My German Language Mission and Goals

German was the second foreign language that I learned in high school and the first foreign language I ever learned to converse in! So I've got a long history with learning German. 

I learned German for three years in high school in the traditional classroom way. Although I did very well in the class and could have basic conversations, despite the class being mostly run in German, we had grammar tables to memorize and vocabulary lists to recite for our teacher. Though I loved learning the grammar while some of the other students were clearly displeased with it, I was really good with learning the verb conjugations, but I could never master the noun cases and found them confusing. I couldn't tell when to use "der", "die", "das", "den", "dem", and "des" except for the Nominative case (more on explaining what noun cases and verb conjugations are in future posts). It was hard for me to pronounce the umlaut vowels, the "ch" sound, and the "r" sound. Then I hosted an exchange student named Sophia from Bavaria for six months and we helped each other with each other's languages, and I could actually pronounce German correctly and converse more in German by the time she left after she helped me with conversation, pronunciation, and grammar. I ended up visiting her a year later for a three-week German language exchange in Germany, traveling through Germany and the Czech Republic and staying at Sophia's house for half of the trip. Visiting her Waldorf school gave me an insight into how foreign languages could be taught through immersion and through not worrying about grammar errors. Though I later applied this method to Spanish in university, after my visit and one more year of German classes my German stagnated for several years and I learned it off and on and not with consistency. 

I finally decided last year, in 2014, to return officially to learning German as I was ashamed of not being able to speak it fluently and I wanted to learn German how I previously learned Spanish and Portuguese, through immersion, comprehensible input (to talk about in a later post), and practicing reading, listening, and conversational skills rather than relying on textbooks. In September 2014 I went back to the textbooks at first and worked on those for a few weeks, and I was amazed at how much German immediately rushed back into my head after four years of not actively learning German, which gave me a tremendous amount of motivation and confidence to return. I didn't have a strategy or plan, but I decided to do something that I would have previously thought crazy: read lots of books and find some interesting content to listen to in German. I didn't know how I would do it at first, but I went for it and listened at first to some slow German news podcasts, which quickly got boring, then jumped into reading "The Little Prince" (Der Kleine Prinz) and "The Alchemist" (Der Alchimist) in German. After meeting Ramona Fellermeier, a German life coach and now good friend of mine, and Skypeing once again with Sophia, as well as getting in contact with a few German learners and a German polyglot named David, I summoned up even more motivation to learn German and I use Ramona's blog posts in German on her website Always Happy Travels and on the online magazine Tongues (tongues.com.au). I've been re-learning German now for about a year and my German is making wonderful progress. However, I'm not yet fluent, so below are my list of goals for my German fluency. 

I've established a timeline to get to be a conversationally fluent German speaker by June 2016, specifically at the B2 level in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and then a C1 level (advanced) by next December. 

My goals are:

- to be able to read and enjoy nonfiction books about personal development, travel, history, and entrepreneurship as well as fantasy novels by next June

- to be able to listen to audiobooks on the following topics above and to listen to and enjoy podcasts about language learning, entrepreneurship, travel, and history by next June. To be able to understand and follow Deutsche Welle.

- to be able to speak three times a week with conversation partners from Germany and Austria and with fluent second language speakers to get regular conversation practice

- to be able to speak fluently and comfortably on all the topics I am interested in during 15 minute and 30 minute conversations

- to be able to have a good understanding of German and Austrian history and cultural references in German

So have you learned German before? What are your goals for learning German? How fluent do you want to be in German? What motivates you to learn German? What are your struggles and triumphs in learning German? Feel free to let me know in the comment box below! Thanks!

As always,

Enhance Your Voyage, Learn A Language! 

You Don't Get "Fluent". You Get "More Fluent"!

Everyone talks about becoming "fluent" in a language. Fluent in 3 Months! Fluent Forever! 

Fluency seems to just be then goal of every language learner, which is great.

However, so many people define fluency as being completely equivalent in proficiency to a native speaker of a language. To many people, that makes sense. 

For me, on the other hand, it doesn't. The truth is, fluency in a language should not be the ultimate goal in language learning. 

The truth is, in my experience, there is no such thing as "fluency" in a foreign language. 

You might ask, "There's no such thing as fluency? That makes absolutely no sense! Why do we even try to get fluent in a foreign language then???"

"Fluency", in the sense of being just as fluent as a native speaker, doesn't exist. Fluency as an absolute concept doesn't exist. 

Instead, fluency should be viewed as relative rather than absolute. In other words, you don't get "fluent" in a language. You get "more fluent" as you keep learning a language.

Fluency isn't a finish line. It's a neverending process of language learning. There is no absolute fluency, but there are fluency levels in language learning. For example there are proficiency tests like the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages)  and the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). The CEFR has six defined levels of fluency from an absolute beginner to native level fluency. The fluency levels are represented as A1 - absolute beginner, A2 - elementary or survival level, B1 - low intermediate, B2 - high intermediate, C1 - advanced, C2 - native level. The ACTFL measures its proficiency levels as Novice-Low, Novice-Mid, Novice-High, Intermediate-Low, Intermediate-Mid, Intermediate-High, Advanced-Low, Advanced-Mid, Advanced-High, Superior, and Distinguished. Both are measured for their listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities and list them all as separate categories of fluency. 

The idea is that fluency is a PROCESS, NOT a RESULT. You can be at a basic level of fluency in one language, have an intermediate level of fluency in another language, an advanced level of fluency in another language, and a native level of fluency in yet another language and it's all OKAY. You don't have to be fluent in a language to communicate in it.

The term "fluency" comes from the Latin fluentia, meaning the flow of a language.

Fluency is the flow, the ease, the comfort at which you are able to speak a language. It is NOT speaking a language perfectly. 

So, I ask of you, PLEASE don't focus on just getting to fluency when learning a language. Learn to enjoy the journey, the process, the voyage of learning a language. 

So what are your experiences of fluency in a foreign language? How have they affected you? Is fluency absolute to you or is it a neverending process? Has this changed your perception of fluency in any way and hopefully inspired you to feel more confident in your language learning? Feel free to let me know! 

As always, 

Enhance Your Voyage, Learn a Language! 

Keeping Accountability, Goal Setting, and Language Notebooks

A common struggle in the language learning process for many people is just being able to keep language accountability. I'm definitely no exception. 

When I started learning foreign languages back in high school, I had no idea what I was doing and didn't really know how to learn a foreign language effectively. Since I was so busy with other classes, I thought that I could get all my language learning time done in the classroom, study hall periods, and when I was at home doing my homework. However when I went to university, I realized that I had more free time, which meant more opportunities to develop my language abilities further. Because I learned Latin in high school, I thought I didn't need any classes for Romance languages so I decided to learn Spanish on my own. I first worked on Spanish in the way I learned languages in the classroom, with textbooks and working on the assignments, because I had no idea what I was doing yet. However I decided I needed to have a regular schedule to keep accountability with my Spanish, so I created a schedule to listen to the Notes in Spanish podcast every day and work on a little of my basic textbook and to practice my Spanish in my Spanish conversation group once a week. By keeping this form of accountability, was able to keep track of my progress in my language learning and started keeping a notebook for my Spanish and writing whatever I could down. I then applied this to Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and other languages. However, I didn't plan when and what time of the day I would make these notes, so my scheduling was irregular for a long time. In 2014 I came across Chris Broholm's Actual Fluency podcast and saw that he was keeping a regular schedule of accountability for his website, podcast, and language learning goals and I watched Steve Kaufmann's (the founder of LingQ) entire 90 Day Korean challenge as he documented on video every day of the learning process. I also participated at the beginning of this year in January and February in Lindsay Dow's (founder of Lindsay does Languages) Instagram Language Challenge (which you can find under the hashtag #IGLC on Instagram), but although I kept my language learning at a consistent schedule especially this year and last, I still manage to not hold myself accountable enough for my writing, blogging, vlogging, and Instagram photos because I tend to focus on quite a lot of different projects and it's hard to focus on all of them at once, so I need to figure out a way to find balance in all those areas. 

I read last week an inspiring post from Kerstin Hammes about the topic of goal setting and language notebooks in which she wrote about "The Miraculous Benefits of Keeping a Language Notebook". My thoughts about this article from my language learning experience: I LOVED IT!!!! It was really enlightening how she said that you can use your notebook as YOUR space, as YOUR creative exercises. Another takeaway was to have scribbles, highlighters, and different kinds of pen, which in all my language note-taking years hadn't considered. It just has really inspired me to keep being productive and to get productive again with my language learning. I'm going to write about my language learning process for each of the languages I'm learning in a notebook for each language. Through reading Kerstin's blog post, I'm very inspired to keep a language journal again.

So what do you do to keep accountability in a foreign language? Do you keep a language learning journal? Do you record or document your language learning in another way? 

Until next time,

Enhance Your Voyage! Learn A Language! 

What Made Me Want to Be a Coach?

For a long time after I started learning languages, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my languages for work.

Many of my friends and relatives of course said things like: "Wow! You know/You're learning so many languages! You should be a translator/interpreter/teacher!" By teacher they meant a classroom teacher, which I thought sounded nice, but it didn't completely fulfill my passion for learning and sharing and helping people with lots of languages through any of those traditional language professions.

I even got suggestions that I should work for the FBI, CIA, or other U.S. government organizations, but the amount of regimentation of my schedule involved in working for them didn't suit me either. 

I had an interest in teaching languages, but not in a conventional classroom setting. However at the time I graduated from high school, I didn't know where to turn to fulfill my passion for teaching and learning languages. So I decided to focus on linguistics because I thought that linguistics would let me teach all languages. However I later realized that linguistics is the scientific study of languages and how they develop. I thought I could fulfill my passion for linguistics through getting a Bachelor's in linguistics, but where I went to university there wasn't a linguistics degree available. I decided to choose the next best things available, international relations and anthropology, though I had no intention of becoming an anthropologist. 

I thought that getting a career as a linguistic anthropologist would satisfy my desire to learn and help people with more languages and that I could use that passion to travel around the world but my professor told me the hard truth. He said that life as an adjunct professor in the United States is very hard and they are under constant pressure to "publish or perish", they had to deal with an unwieldy university bureaucracy, and they were overworked and underpaid for the sheer amount of work they do. The more he described the profession and its realities to me, the more I started to question "What am I doing this for? Is this the right path for the kid of language career I want? Or am I not realizing my full potential? Is THIS what I really want???"

Fortunately during my time in university while searching for videos on YouTube about languages I stumbled upon well known online polyglots and language enthusiasts, such as Moses McCormick, Benny Lewis, Steve Kaufmann, Susanna Zaraysky, Tim Doner, Mike Campbell, Judith Meyer, Richard Simcott, Luca Lampariello, and various others. I found that the way each of the ways these people explained language learning to really resonate with me and it made me feel that I wasn't alone in my language passion, and I was inspired by all of them to learn lots of languages and help other people with learning languages in the way I wanted, so I learned about each of their methods and put hundreds of hours during my university and post university years experimenting in language learning methods, language exchanges, and collecting resources for lots of different languages, trying out various languages and testing their methods on these languages through trial and error (especially with Spanish), seeing what worked and what didn't for me. I wanted to be like them. 

At the same time I decided to search for jobs, read a book called "What Color Is Your Parachute?" to help me decide the career path I wanted to choose, but I felt dead when I read that book. Completely uninspired and demotivated because it just recommended traditional career paths, none of which resonated with me. 

However just after finishing that book in the summer of 2012 I stumbled upon two life changing books by Chris Guillebeau, "The $100 Startup" and "The Art of Nonconformity". "The Art of Nonconformity" ended up becoming one of the most inspiring and influential books in my life because it challenged the entire way I looked at life and career paths, it challenged me to create my own career path, live the life I wanted, travel anywhere, and change the world. I answered with a resounding YES!!!!! 

After finishing university and getting my bachelor's in anthropology and international relations in 2013, I decided I wanted to start a blog, learned about blogging, and got a Wordpress account and set up a website. However I got into a post-graduation dilemma wondering what I should do with my life. Though I thought about being a language coach, I originally wanted to be both a travel blogger and a language blogger, and got the Marie Forleo B-School course (definitely check it out if you're interested in making an online business or improving your online business!!! I'm going to attempt it a second time.) and ended up spending nearly a year of my life until late summer 2014 trying to build a language travel business, but that idea fell through and I was wondering what I could do next. So then I realized that I was passionate about language coaching and felt that that's what I needed to pursue after listening to language coaches and consultants Luca Lampariello, Moses McCormick of Foreign Language Roadrunning, Aaron Meyers of The Everyday Language Learner, and Irina Pravet of Language Catalyst talk about language coaching and what it meant to each of them in each of their YouTube channels. Helping people take charge of their own language learning and become self-directed language learners, I KNEW that coaching was my calling INSTINCTIVELY. Through Marie Forleo's B-School I also stumbled upon Tony Robbins,whose books "Unlimited Power" and "Awaken the Giant Within" I later read, and these books really inspired me to be a coach as well. Joining Toastmasters also reinforced my desire to become a language coach and to really see that I could combine language learning with personal development quite easily. 

Then I met a fellow B-School graduate and life coach Ramona Fellermeier in January, who I exchanged many ideas about coaching with and became fast friends with after several coffee and lunch meetings, a workshop she did, and a couple of Couchsurfing meetings. She recommended me the coaching book "Co-Active Coaching" which I read, and then I started devouring everything I could read about coaching and about personal development from there. When I went to Chris Guillebeau's event The World Domination Summit just this July, I ended up networking with a large number of coaches and entrepreneurs and travelers, making many new friends and professional contacts. Through that event I joined as a member of Live Your Legend and as part of the coach Jacob Sokol's Sensophy Inner Circle, which will help me continue to build my skills as a novice coach and novice speaker and leader even further. 

Thus that's my journey so far in becoming a coach. 

So for those of you interested in coaching, including language coaching, what do you think a language coach is? What does being a language coach mean to you personally?  Let me know in the comments and until next time, Enhance Your Voyage, Learn A Language!!! 

Why and How I Fell in Love with Language Learning

There was a time in my life where I wasn't a language enthusiast and didn't think about becoming a language coach or a language teacher once. 

Before I turned 14, I liked science and dreamed of being a scientist (especially a biologist or an astronomer), though I was never good at math so I eventually lost interest and wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. At the time, the only culture I knew was American culture and I only spoke English and didn't think I needed anything else. I thought about learning a foreign language, but I was very comfortable the way I was. 

However that was all about to change when I went on my first trip to Europe.

On this family trip in Europe which happened exactly ten years ago, I was exposed to completely new cultures, ways of life, ways of thinking, architecture, and languages. Traveling through Spain, Italy, and Germany greatly expanded my world beyond anything I ever imagined, though I thought that I would just need English to get by and I only learned a few phrases. Then I got stranded in the subway in Italy for ten minutes when I jumped out of the subway car in Rome too early before my parents told me to get off. Never in my life was I more traumatized and frightened than in the moment the subway cars sped away with my parents still inside. 

I didn't know what to do, what to say, how to ask for help (I didn't know the Italian word for "help"). The worst part for me was that no one spoke any English. I froze in paranoid terror, fearing that people would try to capture me and take me away to god knows where. I was ready to scream and cry with no one to understand my plight. I thought I would never see my parents or my grandparents or anyone I knew again. I was isolated from everything I knew.

Fortunately my parents came to the rescue, with my mother asking the subway office how she could find a "grande bambino" (thanks mom!) and my father running down to where I was to get me. I was so relieved to see them both (even though they were only one stop away from where I was)! 

That memory was so burned into my mind that I made a vow to myself right afterwards to never go to another country again without speaking at least a little bit of their language because I never wanted to relive my horrible experience in the Roman subway. I associated monolingualism with having a serious handicap from then on.

On a more positive note, being exposed to the Basque language in the Basque Country of Spain got me extremely interested in learning languages because I had never heard of Basque before I went to Spain and it was not related to any other language on earth. I thought Basque was really cool and it made me want to learn multiple languages to see how these languages were different from English. During that trip I began to get both the travel bug and the language bug, which only got stronger during my high school and university years and a second and third trip to Europe (more on those in a future post). 

I originally wanted to learn a few languages, but after three years of Latin, three years of German, and one year of Mandarin Chinese in high school (along with hosting a German exchange student for six months and then visiting her a year later), I fell in love with languages and decided I wanted to learn as many as possible so I could travel more and learn more about the world. Languages cultivated my love for learning in general! 

So what makes you motivated to learn a language? Why do you want to learn a language? Do you want to learn multiple languages or are you a language enthusiast as well? What was your experience with learning about cultures different from yours? Feel free to let me know in the comments! Thanks!