Dummy guide to surviving in Germany

I have often been asked the question, why Germany, of all the places? To be honest, when I first accepted the offer to come over here to further my tertiary education, I didn’t have a wee bit of notion of how it would be like to live in an environment that speaks a totally different language from my own. However I am lucky enough to grow up in a multiracial country where we are trained since small to be able to speak different languages, so I thought it shouldn’t be a hindrance for me.

Although we attended 2 long years of German language course and passing my German Language Exam as an entrance requirement to a German University, almost similar to TOEFL, we were far from being prepared of facing the ‘real’ face-to-face conversation with a German. All the while in Malaysia, we were only speaking German during the lecture and after that back to our mother tongue. It felt so strange to speak the language outside the classroom among ourselves!

The harsh reality sank in when we were forced to use the language on a daily basis after arriving here. Suddenly we weren’t in German lectures anymore, where our lecturer used to patiently pronounce word by word to us, speaking as slowly as possible for us to catch the words.

Here, I had a feeling that my brain was like an overworked microprocessor, trying to interpret as fast as possible the words into English. It happened sometimes that I lost track in the middle of a sentence and then I’ll just put on my greatest smile and nodded ‘Uh huh‘ . While conversing, I had to make sure not to think in English and speak in German because the sentence structure is completely different for both languages.

Sometimes your face just to have be thick enough in order to learn from experience. I recalled once when I had to extend my student visa at the immigration office a few weeks after I arrived, I was being sent back to bring along someone who understand enough German because she didn’t understand me and she thought that I didn’t understand her. Well, I really didn’t know what she wanted .

So you see, that’s how I survived my first year.