AUSTRALIA - ADELAIDE

A second language is always hard for everyone. Before I went to Australia, I was a bit scared of speaking English. Unless I absolutely had to, I have always avoided speaking a foreign language. It has always been like that, also at school in English lessons. But now I wanted to face my fears and improve my English skills, which was also one of the reasons why I decided to do a semester abroad.

I was also nervous about speaking English here in Adelaide at first. But I quickly noticed that everyone understands me well and it doesn't matter if you don't know a word. You can always paraphrase a word and normally everyone knows which word is missing from the context anyway.

But I also have to admit that there was not such a big language barrier for me as for other exchange students. For example, I am here with a friend from the University of Liechtenstein, we also live together, which of course means that we only speak German at home. There are also many exchange students who are from Germany, who we meet from time to time. German is also spoken there, insofar as there is no one who speaks another language.

Something I thought was different is Australian English. A lot of people told me before my trip that Australians are not easy to understand. But I've never really had this problem here. When you talk to older people, you sometimes have to concentrate more, but you can still understand them well. But that could also be because we live in the city. On our road trip to Perth, we also met a lot of people from the countryside, who had a bit more difficult English to understand. Nevertheless, we could communicate without any problems very well.

Since Adelaide, or Australia in general, is rather international anyway, almost everyone makes mistakes when speaking. This somehow takes away the fear of making mistakes. For example, we have a lot of contact with Chinese and Indians. English is also a second language for them. As a result, even the mistakes don't bother you that much, because the other person knows how difficult it can sometimes be to speak a foreign language. But even if you talk to someone whose mother language is English, it doesn't bother you anymore. On the contrary, most find it fascinating how well we can speak English.

Something that has changed from Austria to Australia is that I started watching movies on Netflix in English. I did that sometimes at home, but not always. Now it's normal for me to watch movies in English. That certainly helped me to improve my English skills.

I think I've improved my English skills quite a bit. I would have liked to speak even more English, but it is also good as it is right now. I am definitely grateful that I can improve my English skills here in Australia. This is my first time living abroad, so it's a whole new experience for me too. In my opinion, it has already made me more confident in some respects in speaking but also in my general demeanor.

All in all I have to say that you only can learn a language by speaking it. I was never confident speaking English in Austria. But that is only because I was always to scared to speak. That is why I was never really able to speak by myself and only understood what people told me in English. But now being forced to speak it I realized English is not even that hard to speak.