Hey, there! Seeing as the my last post on this blog was entitled, "Herbstferien Adventures" and never even made it past the draft-phase, I feel like this post should start off with a brief explanation for my absence. There are two main factors that caused the blog post shortage, the first being a problem with content and the second being language struggles. However, since I am now well over halfway done with my time in Germany, I am going to attempt to combat these two problems in the next months and continue to post here for the remainder of my exchange year.
Now, when I say I ran into a "content problem" shortly after the end of Fall Break, I don't mean that at that point I stopped doing things with my life and therefore had absolutely nothing to write about. Actually, I wrote quite a lot in the late fall but the subjects of my writing weren't really what I was looking to post and share with others. At the point at which I stopped writing on my blog, I had already been living in Norderstedt a couple months and was successfully settling into and Alltag routine. I was still meeting tons of new people all the time and struggling to understand the German that surrounded me, but I had a schedule and I had a routine. At this point in my exchange, my writing fell into three general genres:
1) GERMAN PRACTICE- In terms of content, this "genre" is very, very broad. Pretty much the only commonality that ties these pieces together is that they are in German. The motivation behind this category was simply to be thinking/practicing/producing more German. So when I had a free moment, I'd sit down and write SOMETHING in Germans, a vignette, a story, a journal entry, basically anything that came into my mind. It was a good way to express myself in German and see what I had the vocabulary to say and what vocab I lacked in a low pressure situation where I could look up the words I needed. I thought that these would be fun to go back and read later in the year to see how my German improved... Turns out, they actually just make me cringe more than anything else at the weird topics I chose and my horrible grammar. I'm hoping with time I will find them more endearing...
2) OBLIGATORY JOURNAL ENTRIES- I successfully have a journal entry for everyday of my exchange year. The quality and detail varies immensely, as sometimes I'm very motivated to record my life and sometimes there are things I would just rather forget... My journal started out in my broken German waaaayyy back in August when I, being the good, motivated exchange student that I was, wanted to use every possible second to practice and improve my German. In the beginning, I even noted some new words I'd learn everyday and my Happy/Crappy (Camp T <3). Then after a while, this became tedious and I switched to English so I could quickly scribble out an outline of my day and go to bed quickly. But what is really interesting is that at some point, I started writing my journal entries in "Denglish" simply because that's how my brain was working. (I feel like I need a separate blog post for this analysis...) Now, I write almost exclusively in German with a day here and there in Spanish.
3) EXCHANGEY THINGS- This is not an interesting genre. Exchangey things were notes I took at seminars, questions I needed to ask my Betreuerin, or lists of things to do. I also still have some plans for blog posts I never wrote... Goal: keep some order in my life.
So clearly, there was writing happening... just not here. I also didn't really want to post that much daily life stuff or chilling with friends because I find that content better suited for a journal than the internet. Yes, I could/should have posted some stuff about the cool big events in my life here (trip to Amsterdam/Vienna/Bremen/Luebeck/Munich, 50th Anniversary of my hostfamily's family business, birthdays, concerts etc.), but at this point the second problem comes into play.
If you have never completely immersed yourself in another language for an extended period of time, you cannot understand what happens to your brain. I first found blog writing becoming a chore as I noticed how the amount of English that I used in a day, severely affected my German. I really wanted to learn as much and as fast as I could so I thought a break from blogging would help. I considered starting to write in German but quickly decided that to be a terrible idea as 1) my German was NOT sufficient to write entertainingly, 2) everyone who reads this can speak English but you can't all necessarily speak German, and 3) I was/am not ready to post my mistake-filled German for people to read. Then, as I became more comfortable with the language and decided to revisit my blog, I found myself struggling to write in English. I know. It sounds silly to say that you can "unlearn" your first language but you definitely can. This doesn't mean I was perfectly fluent in German. This just means that as I was writing, I wouldn't be able to think of the words I needed in English, but rather in German or I'd write a sentence with English words but use German sentence structure. (Again. Separate blog post needed.) I had a very hard time finding a coherent voice when writing in English and found the experience of just being mediocre in two languages very stressful. I abandoned my blog again out of frustration.
The fact that I've returned to my blog does not mean that this problem has disappeared, on the contrary actually, but it does mean that I'm slowly realizing that in three very, very, very short months I will be going back to the US and then in ~4-5 months starting at college and at some point I have to articulate myself in another language again. I've also realized what a different perspective I have now on the year being almost through rather than right at the beginning and that I actually have things I do want to say now while I have this world fresh on the brain. So hopefully, I can keep up with this and successfully work posting into my schedule so that I can share my last months of this crazy year and reflect a bit.
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