Bilingual or Multilingual has not been an unfamiliar topic to me, being born and raised in a Multilingual country, I was speaking three different languages everyday: Chinese with my family, Malay with my colleagues and English with my friends. Therefore, I thought to learn and pick up a new language is an easy task for me, but I was totally wrong. German being on of the most difficult languages in the world, I now understand the reason why? I started to get interested in German around 6 years ago, in 2018, due to my brother was living in Germany and I admired his fluent German speaking skills. I started to watch YouTube videos of German language classes and listen to German songs, since then I found my favourite German artist: Max Giesinger. I mainly self-taught myself with this new language for 5 years, but due to the lack of time from studying and working, slowly I lost interest in learning German.
Fast forward to 2023, when I moved to Germany to continue my masters study, I started to feel the pressure of not being familiar to German. In the beginning, I could only read and understand a few German words and I tried to guess the meaning of it, but it was really difficult for me to make sense of those words. I can barely talk to anyone or even to ask for help, I felt very felt out due to the language barrier. Since then, I set a target for myself that in a year, I hope to be able to improve my hearing skills and to be able to understand what other people are talking. I started to take German classes from A1 Level to A2 Level, texting with my German speaking friends in very simple German sentences and slowly building up.
When I’m about to be able to understand Hoch Deutsch a bit better, I decided to move to Liechtenstein for an exchange semester, and Lord knows that they speak a whole another kind of German: Swiss German. Before moving to Vaduz, I was very stressed out to not able to understand the locals and it’s a nightmare starting all over again, but still I try to stay positive and I might be able to survive with my broken Hoch Deutsch! To my surprise, that everyone in the University or everyone that I came across with are willing to speak High German with me. At first, I was very sceptical about to talk to anyone is High German, as they might dislike me for not speaking Swiss German, but I tried anyways. “There first time for everything”, I remember the first time speaking in High German in the university was at the Front Desk and I needed to collect my residence permit. I started the conversation with:” Hallo, ich möchte meinen Ausweis abholen” and she replied back in Hoch Deutsch to me, at this moment I felt so much relief that someone understood what I’m speaking! I was extremely grateful that everyone is very accepting of my broken German skills and willing to have a conversation with me, which I don’t experience this everyday