At the beginning of the semester I set myself clear but yet realistic goals. I wanted to improve my writing skills and enrich my vocabulary in German. I am learning and improving German for years now, I lived in Germany as a little child and I studied abroad in Germany, yet I still have to practice it every day. It is very easy to forget a language. By that I mean, speaking and writing the language. Certainly, I do not really have problems understanding, but when it comes to speaking and writing, namely expressing myself, I am aware of my lack of vocabulary.
I have been a language learner and cultural explorer since I was born. Growing up in Germany in a Bosnian family forced me to learn two languages simultaneously. Because I did not attend kindergarten nor school in Germany and I spoke only Bosnian to my family at home, my Bosnian excelled while my German stagnated. Ever since my family moved back to Bosnia I had the task to keep my German alive. At the same time I wanted to keep improving my German skills and go from “baby” to academic language. And I have done that by taking German classes and learning by myself. During this semester I learned more about the ways a language can be learned and the methods that work the best for me personally.By reading all the assigned articles I understood the concept of processing words and learning grammar. I also learned how we give a meaning to a word and sentence. Least but not last, I understood the significance and the benefits of speaking more than one language when learning a new one. For example, I never realized the influence English has on my German skills and vice versa. Now that I know that English and German belong to the same language group - Germanic languages, I always try to relate those two languages and their rules when inquiring new words. Learning more about the German culture enabled me to understand culture and tradition related words, which do not have a translation into Bosnian, English or other languages. Additionally, I found it useful to learn about the history of the German language, because I have never bother to learn it before, and knowing it gives more sense to the current German sentence structure and vocabulary.
I used different techniques to improve my German language skills. I mostly enjoyed watching German shows and listening to podcasts and writing summaries and reflection papers after that. That helped me to learn new words from context, using new vocabulary and rephrasing content in my own words. Moreover, it helped me practice indirect speech, which I always had trouble with. I did not really have difficulties in learning new nouns. I just made sure that I would actually use them and make sense of their meaning. The difficult part was learning new irregular verbs, because I had to learn the infinite tense as well as the other tenses. Praeteritum was the most difficult tense for me to learn, because it is rather used in written text than in speech.
Overall, I found all the articles that we were assigned very interesting. They gave me a better insight into the learning process and how languages function. I mostly enjoyed the “Communicative Competence” chapter and the “Are bilinguals really smarter” article, because they directly reflected on my learning habits and unconscious learning methods.
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