Why I Broke my Promise

I recently spoke with an American who decided to attend the Uni Wien for his undergraduate studies. We had known each other cursorily last semester, having a few mutual friends and having one class together, and when I saw him again, I asked him how he had been doing. In English. Which surprised him.

"Last semester," he said, "you seemed totally committed to only speaking German. You gave up on that?" And it was at that moment that I realized that I have. I still would never presume to speak English to an Austrian uninvited, and I do carry on awkward two-language conversations, in which each person uses the native language of the other, with certain Austrian friends, but I no longer get steamed if people want to speak English with me sometimes or if I wind up speaking English during an evening out.

The more I think about my former attitude, the more I realize how "typical study abroad student" it was. It was dehumanizing, in a way, to view my conversation partners more as living, breathing Sprachübungen (language practice activities) rather than as people with whom I wanted to communicate because of their value as human beings. Ironically, though, it was the success of my first strategy that led to the adoption of my new one. I started to want to talk to my Austrian friends not because I might learn new vocabulary or find an opportunity to use some obscure tense, but because I actually had stories, jokes, experiences I wanted to share with them. And when that's the goal, language becomes secondary, the flexible tool I had always believed it to be -- for everyone except myself.

I also spent too much time last semester thinking in a binary: English with Americans, or German with Austrians. But one of the greatest things about European cities like Vienna is that they draw a huge amount of national and linguistic diversity. On Monday night, for example, my friend Marshall (a two-semester veteran of Central College Abroad) had a goodbye party that was attended by his Brazilian girlfriend; Austrian dormmates; American program-mates; Ukrainian, Turkish, Spanish and Hungarian friends from his German courses; among others. And almost every new conversation required a renegotiation of language -- Should we speak German or English? Do we pull in someone else to translate into Spanish or Hungarian? -- all with the goal of understanding each other as we chatted, laughed, drank, and celebrated our mutual friend.

I still avoid going out with large groups of Americans and speaking English. That's not why I'm here. But experiencing European life is not about avoiding English like the plague; it's about getting to know Europeans. And as my circle of friends in Vienna grows, I'm learning to be more flexible with the first part in order to truly experience the second.