It’s crunch time. In one week, I will spend two weeks with Alex’s parents and experience my first lectures and labs in a German university. I am beyond apprehensive, scared, unprepared – so much that I’m relatively calm. So for now I’m cramming as much info as I can handle with my turtle slow German/English learning pace. But first, I thought I’d share this:
With Alex gone during the week, no more language classes, too many English conversations, and me translating my lecture material in English, I’ll admit listening to German TV is not enough and I’m losing my prepositions, articles, and sentence structure. Alex confirmed that my German language skills are getting lax and we got into a small tizzy about him correcting me.
It’s a very touchy subject between couples. On one hand we want our partner to be our cheerleader, tell us how cool or right we are and on the other hand we want our partner to be our coach/mentor and help us grow or see things we are unable to see about ourselves. Sadly, I think after awhile a lot of couples give up the latter part to ‘save’ their relationship. This is something I definitely don’t want to allow to happen.
Let’s face it, not everyone has the gift for on-the-spot courteous rhetoric. Receiving the non-glamous truth from our partner hurts a lot at times, which makes us perceive that our partner’s intentions are then to hurt us. This is such a preventable pitfall but can easily deepen if we never reveal our troubled interpretations. What’s worse is that sometimes our closest friends and relatives wrongly encourage these doubtful perceptions, when what we really need is to go to the source, find out from our partner what they really meant and let him/her know your thoughts about what he/she said.
Too simple, you say. Really it is. But I didn’t say it would be easy. Not convinced? Well alright, then. What do I know? After all, I’m just a young whippersnapper living in an unannounced committed relationship without the social comfort of the M-word to ground my observations. (What do we lose when we are so blinded and deafened by our ultimate standards and absolutes? what do we maintain?)
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So we talk it out, as rough as it can be sometimes and we make up..with homemade chocolate cupcakes. I give the directions in German, measure out the ingredients and Alex stirs the goodies together. Team work. And will power – we ate only one. The rest were giving out to butter up his colleague at work because he’s the new guy on the project. Now on to brush up my German :bye:
Hubby said that when he was with his girlfriend the stronger language always won out. For him it was German. Consequently his German got to be very, very good. But, every so often he will be totally stumped and ask me to ask my friend in Berlin something.
Yes I agree that is a real tension – i find myself increasingly asking ‘how can i help/what can i do’ which makes it more of a constructive process -rather than just wading in with heh you need to do xyz. I guess it comes down to how much of the change we can own ourselves and how we can encourage our partner by supporting them not bayoneting them :thumbup:
@Maribeth: For us, English is the strongest. That’s my very problem, I don’t ask enough questions. I seem to enjoy banging my head against the language barrier instead of just asking the master by my side.
@Paul: Well said. Sometimes I lose sight of things and forget our relationship is not static. Change is hard, especially when I still sometimes feel I’m surrounded by enough of it, even after living in a foreign country over 1 1/2 years. What’s important is that we don’t give up on each other even just a little bit. I’m also all for not ‘batting the bunny’ around. Thanks for the visit:-)
Best of luck with the continued language studies…at least you are both supporting eachother as you learn. And what better way to reconnect then over chocolate cupcakes!!
My fiance has been considering learning Japanese for a few reasons (her mother in law will be Japanese, a lot of her Buddhist friends are Japanese, I like watching Japanese TV and movies, etc) so she’s in something of a similar fix. Her biggest concern though is that I’m a bit of a prankster and she’s worried that if she needs help she won’t be able to turn to me because I’ll mislead her.
I probably wouldn’t, but I guess even I can’t be entirely certain…
Stick with it– as annoying as it may seem to be corrected now it will pay off in spades later!
My husband is Dutch, and at some point I realized that I was never really going to learn the language unless we switched over and stopped speaking English to each other.
The first six months were horrific! I was going through the same thing you mention, torn between wanting to learn to speak properly and being frustrated and hurt whenever he’d correct me. (I even remember him correcting me once during one of our rare arguments! I wanted to kill him!!!)
But in the end the effort was really worth it. Because the annoyance can be an incentive as well, and you’ll eventually become fluent enough that you’ll end up correcting him at some point! And that’s a wonderful feeling.
Plus, it never hurts to have a reason to eat homemade chocolate cupcakes…
(tried to enter my URL but keep getting an error message for some reason.)
@Tracy: thanks
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@James: Learning a foreign language as a hobby or to use some of the time is pretty difficult to achieve fluency without having more than 50-80% of the time hardcore Japanese streaming through the brain. In all honesty, you are going to find a lot of her mistakes either hilarious or painful to your ears and it will show. Sometimes she’ll agree, sometimes not. Just remember it’s an awesomely sweet gesture; it shows commitment and interest in her future with you.
@Betsy: I couldn’t have explained it better. The first six months were pretty tough. I’ve got a ways to go before I correct him, but I’m gaining ground.
(I corrected the URL problem. My antispam software has issues with blogspot it seems. Sorry about that.)