Sprechen Sie Englisch???

When we first arrived to Berlin, our favourite, and most used phrase, was 'Sprechen Sie Englisch???', which was always uttered with more than a hint of desperation. The problem was that we came to Berlin with the expectation that all German people spoke perfect English. In fairness several different people had told us this, and I had also remembered from my few weeks in Northern Germany as a teenager seeing my German counterparts reading Pride and Prejudice in their English class and having late night chats (in English) about everything under the sun.

We should have known better. My memory can, at times, be best described as fiction. (As the t-shirt logo goes 'I make stuff up' [sometimes]). The truth is all German people don't speak English. Actually in our experience only about 10% of them do. Which is fine since they are GERMAN after all (!!!) and so it was pretty ridiculous that we would expect them to speak anything other than German.

However, because of this myself and Eric found it very hard to get around Berlin at the beginning. Any interaction was daunting and we had numerous frustrating, and also hilarious encounters. (We met one woman at Dee's brother Shaun's gig whom we thought was a hairdresser to small dogs but it turned out she was a hairdresser who hated 'small talk'. We took the hint and finished the conversation pretty quickly after that!).


Anyway, common sense prevailed and we enrolled ourselves into the nearest language school (it is literally down the road from us) into a school called Tandem. I have to say that it was pretty hard-going at the beginning. My brain wasn't used to concentrating like that for prolonged periods of time and Eric said the same, having not been in school in over 20 years. In the first couple of weeks we both had backaches, headaches, basically every kind of stress ache you can imagine.

However a month of intensive classes on (3-hours a day, 5 days a week), I can happily report we are delighted with it. We were really lucky with our class, and our teachers, everyone has been really nice. (Above is a photo of most of the class, the woman in the middle in the blue shirt is Barbara, one of our teachers. She is our favourite as she is patient, funny and a very good teacher). We are a motley crew - 1 Irish (me), 1 American (Eric), 1 Scottish (Julie), 2 Spanish (David and Kiko), 1 Argentinian (Gabrielle), 1 French (Elize), 2 Japanese (Kanako and Yukiko) and 1 Chinese (Youyou).

I think myself and Eric have really come on with our Deutsch since the course has started. The little bit of German I learnt as a teenager has finally started to come back to me and Eric, from having no German, can now buy groceries and talk a bit about himself. It's been a really good experience for me and has given me a boost of confidence as I had always pegged myself as 'not good at languages'. It's great to know that learning a new language though definitely difficult, isn't impossible. Proper conversations auf Deutsch with German people here we come!