[DoreenMichele]

Thirty years ago, I lived in Germany as a military wife for nearly four years. Pretty much everywhere I needed to go and interact, everyone spoke fluent English and businesses near the American military post had signs in English and catered to the Americans.

I showed up knowing some German because my mother is German. My fluency only improved marginally in the time I was there because most Germans I met spoke English and were thrilled to have the opportunity to practice their English with a native speaker, so I was actively denied opportunities to improve my German because they would promptly begin speaking English to me.

When we did day trips to do touristy stuff, it was helpful that I knew more German than most Americans there. I carried a German-English dictionary with me and looked up words I saw on signs. (You can now do that much easier on a smartphone.)

It may actually be nigh impossible to learn German, even if you want to. I wanted to, so badly. Almost no one would speak it with me.

I am still not fluent in German and it would be too hard to get there via intentional self study to be worth the effort to me. It should have been vastly easier to learn through immersion while living there, but almost no one would speak German with me in Germany.

It quite aggravated me. In my youth, I wanted to be a translator and I wanted to learn seven languages fluently. I know a smattering of German, French, Greek, Spanish and Russian (and took French and classical Greek in college). I'm not fluent in any of them.

I've turned my attention to learning languages like HTML and CSS. I'm not fluent in them either, but they are infinitely more useful to me in day-to-day life.

[dirkt]

> It may actually be nigh impossible to learn German, even if you want to. I wanted to, so badly. Almost no one would speak it with me.

The trick is to be direct about that you want to speak German. Germans are direct, it's not impolite. "Entschuldigen Sie, können wir Deutsch sprechen? Ich muss es üben." will get the majority to switch to German.

And if you have German friends and they know you've been in Germany now for a longer period, and some stage they'll decide "Jetzt muss sie aber wirklich mal Deutsch lernen" and start to speak exclusively German to you.

The "I am polite and speaking English" thing is usually only applied to strangers.

[DoreenMichele]

I'm trying to think also of how you would increase your social exposure to settings where you would just socialize with native speakers. That's what needs to happen to get immersion. I'm coming up blank.

I got to practice a little at my first apartment. It was a downstairs unit and the rest of the building was the home of my landlord. It was a tiny farm village about twenty minutes from the American post.

I broke the lease and moved because my baby was very sick there. My next apartment was a four story building, but all the tenants were American. Then I finally got quarters and the entire neighborhood was American with American services (grocery store, daycare, gas station).

I actively tried to shop at German stores and things like that. It turned out to not be practical. It made more sense to shop at the American stores.

We needed living room furniture. We went downtown to shop. It was all giant shranks.

It didn't provide the kind of storage we needed, it was out of our price range and I knew that taking it home to the US would be a bad idea. We mostly needed shelves for books. German apartments have fewer closets and windows than American homes, so they have long expanses of wall. Shranks are designed to work in that kind of housing.

When you take a shrank back to America, you can't easily find housing that will hold it. A friend of mine had a custom house built in the US to get a wall to fit her shrank. I went house hunting with my sister. We looked at a house where they added a room -- with a stupidly long hallway just for that room -- to hold their German shrank. They were selling the shrank with the house. The listing said "shrank remains with house."

So, disappointed, we returned to base and bought American bookshelves. It made far more sense.

We did day trips on the weekends to visit castles. This is a tourist activity. It's not conducive to long conversations with locals.

I visited my best friend when she was in Germany visiting her relatives. She and I stayed up late talking to catch up -- in English, of course. She spoke fluent German, but we hadn't seen each other in some time and wouldn't again for sometime. She didn't invite me over to teach me German. It made no sense to try to speak German together. We were together to get caught up. English made more sense.

I took scuba diving with a German company. They spoke much better English than I did German. I was still breastfeeding. It made no sense for me to join everyone for a beer after class at a local pub. I couldn't drink and I needed to get home to my baby. It ended up being too exhausting and I dropped out of the class even though they had a no refund policy.

All my efforts to connect with people in settings where I should have had more exposure to German basically went nowhere.

I could make small talk with waiters at restaurants or whatever, but I just wasn't finding myself in social settings where it made sense for others to expect me to make the effort to really engage in serious conversation in German.

I'm leaving this comment as food for thought for other people who may be considering living elsewhere and/or desire to learn another language. I might have learned more German had I continued to live in a tiny farm village where no one spoke English, but I couldn't do that because it was making my baby sick. All other social settings I found myself in failed to foster conversation in German.

If you do what makes sense to make your life work, you may just not have that many opportunities to practice German, even while living in Germany. Luck and circumstance are factors, but I was actively seeking to escape the American bubble I lived in and get out into the local culture and largely failing to find opportunities to talk with people conversationally in German. I already knew enough German to help make tourist activities easier for us to navigate. That doesn't result in conversational fluency.

I spent years listening to tapes in one language or another, doing home study courses, watching TV in Spanish with subtitles, looking up Russian words on the internet, etc etc. Trying to improve my exposure to other languages was a hobby for a lot of years.

It's never gotten me anywhere near the kind of fluency I desired and I've never found much real use for any of it. It was a largely pointless hobby.

I eventually quit actively working on it. It wasn't fruitful, and not for lack of trying.

[hutzlibu]

But you lived in a very american bubble then. Other parts of germany are not quite english adopted.

Berlin is mixed. The younger generation does speak english, but you can not expect the bus driver to understand you.

[heurisko]

My German learning experience has been exactly the same. It is frustrating to have plateaued at a certain level.

In Berlin I found a tandem partner who grew up under the DDR and spoke Russian instead of English which is how I practised.

Something I also found is that if you start off speaking English with someone, it is nearly impossible to change your relationship into a German one, whereas if you start off speaking German, it seems to reoccur again in the future.

It's like your first impression cements which language you're associated with.