The Shadow of Fluency

Since I've been home, several people have asked me whether I'm fluent in German now. The answer: I don't know. There's no border to cross, no test to take, no magic moment in which you get your German-speaker membership card and all the Austrians welcome you as a member of the tribe.

I no longer have the language problems I described at the beginning of the semester -- expressing myself in German is never really a problem for me anymore, I can understand the various Austrian dialects (even if it takes me a few seconds longer to process some of them), and I sometimes find myself struggling to find the English equivalent of a German phrase whenever I'm describing Austria to someone here.

My vocabulary is still limited, of course, because my experiences as a German speaker are also limited. I didn't know the German word for "boarding pass," for example, until I printed the boarding pass for my flight home for Christmas and saw the word "Bordkarte" at the top of the page. And I never attended third grade in Austria, so I didn't know that the cold-blooded animal with the beady eyes and large tongue a friend of mine was describing is "die Eidechse" -- Mrs. Phillifent at St. Gabriel Elementary School just told me it was a lizard. But that's also the case for native speakers of a language: I feel a lot like the thirteen-year-old version of myself, who always had to go home and check Urban Dictionary after a night out with friends (who had older siblings and thus seemed to know more about everything). Right now, there's still some Googling required, but I learn enough from the conversation itself to have a general sense of each new word.

At the beginning of the semester, I introduced myself on the Central College Abroad blog by saying that I wanted "to further progress towards my eventual goal of fluency in German." I was being modest. I fully expected to become fluent in German this semester, to check "bilingual" off on my list of accomplishments, and to begin working on my next language. I now know that I'll never be able to just throw German aside, like one of my high school debate trophies collecting dust on a shelf in my parents' house, and whip it out for resumes and the like. I still want to start learning a new language next year (Spanish? Hindi/Urdu? Russian?), but I also plan to continue seeking out opportunities to use German. That's why I want to come back to Germany or Austria this summer, why I'm working my way through Season One of a German-language TV show over break, and why I try to decipher the netspeak Facebook messages my roommate exchanges with her friends from her village. Every new experience gives me topic-specific vocabulary, and represents another stepping stone on what will hopefully be a lifelong process of maintaining and expanding my German language skills.