LIECHTENSTEIN

2nd Blog by Ostap Bodi - Tuesday, 12 December 2023, 4:39 PM Forgetting my own language
Starting to talk about the language, I should probably mention my background in getting involved in foreign languages. While English was following me from the beginning of my life, due to the fact that all games and many foreign pop culture trends were originally created in English and usually had no perspective to be translated into Ukrainian, I started to study English from a very young age, and as a result, I don’t have many troubles understanding natives and products created with English localization. However, the situation differs for speaking abilities because I hadn’t had the opportunity to speak with someone in English; it was simply not needed. In the end, it reaches the point of being able to only answer simple questions with a limited amount of words that are most often used, and when you start speaking about more complicated topics, you simply can’t express yourself properly, and you spend seconds trying to remember a word that you know but forgot because it isn’t used as often as others. So you start feeling a bit insecure about your proficiency level, which says that you are b2+. But right now I feel that I have started to use more vocabulary, and I can make people understand me more clearly without uncomfortable pauses to remind myself of a word. Lectures are also not a big deal; even if there is some unknown word, I can easily look for the meaning in a dictionary; sometimes I can come up with the meaning myself from context, so I don’t face any troubles in understanding the topics.

German from the other side is completely another story. My parents sent me to a specialized German school. I studied German for 7 years, but to tell the truth, I was more forced to study in order to get good marks than because I wanted to speak German. Later, when I changed schools, I was still studying German with tutors, but it wasn’t the ultimate solution to avoid losing my speaking skills. When I came here, I can’t say that I had problems, I felt pretty secure in my understanding and could understand probably 80% of what was said. The main problem was my inability to answer, all I could say was "Entschuldigung, Deutsch nicht so gut". However, after some time here, I can even build sentences myself, probably because I remember grammar and have never had much trouble with it. In my opinion, it is pretty logical, vocabulary is a major issue, which was a bit solved here because every day's routine is filled with German. 


I think those communication skills will be very useful in the future because every year more people start learning English, and we can more easily talk with each other using languages both people can understand. German is also one of the gestalts, I wanted to close for a long time. I’m still far from it, but at least I've started to take some steps in this direction. Also, I understood that I study languages more by their meanings, like in my mother language, where I don’t translate words from Ukrainian to English, German, or Polish, I just know that words mean this, and they should be used like that. Somehow, I think in this language. I'm not sure about it because I’m not a scientist, but that’s how I feel.


What I feel that I also want to mention is a reflection about my mother language. Due to the environment, I don’t get the opportunity to speak Ukrainian, and I start to forget some words. Learning other languages is a good thing, but because I started to read, watch and live in the English/German bubble, I practice only with my family and friends, and some words are sometimes hard to remember. I should probably read a book in Ukrainian and take a little break from “everything in English” mania. In any language, there is this problem-lack of practice causes a fall in proficiency level. 

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