Hello Meng-Chen, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. As you know, a friend of mine recommended that I have a conversation with you since you have been learning a particular language from scratch. Could you maybe elaborate on the language I am referring to?

The story started roughly three years ago. Originally, I am from Taiwan where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from the National Tsing Hua University. During the second year of my bachelor’s, I had a chance to choose some extra-curricular electives. Out of pure coincidence, I got a place in a German language course. Generally speaking, foreign language courses are quite popular in Taiwan and therefore it is hard to get accepted in such an elective. I was lucky that I was able to start learning German for one year. 

As enthusiastic as I was at the beginning of the course, I gradually realised that the pace of the course was really slow. After attending the elective for one entire academic year, we only got to an A1 level. In the meantime, I was also contemplating whether I should study abroad during and after my bachelor’s programme. I decided to go to Germany (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) during my exchange program. A great opportunity to further improve and sharpen my German skills in Germany! 

Even though you mentioned that the German language elective at the National Tsing Hua University had a rather slow pace, you still decided to go to Germany. Hence, I am curious to learn more about what drove you to keep being motivated in regards to the German language. 

One of the main reasons is linked to my background in materials science and engineering. Germany has a lot of opportunities for engineers to further build their career. Engineering faculties throughout the country are well-established and well-known on a global scale. I am also planning to stay abroad for an additional three to five years after my master’s graduation. In order to gain more work experience in the engineering field, I think Germany is a great place to stay.  

Got it. That seems like a very good reason to me. 

So, before I arrived in Germany for my exchange program, I did not know much about German culture. All the knowledge that I possessed, was derived from the German language textbooks. During my exchange program in Karlsruhe, I applied German in daily life for the first time. I started to be fascinated by the language! I was able to set my own pace of learning, in contrast to the elective in Taiwan. Every day I was learning new things. The best feeling was being able to apply my knowledge of the German language instantly. 

What were your strategies to learn how to make conversations in German when you were in Karlsruhe? 

Well, I immediately started with a German language course at the B1 level. My first German course in Germany! I felt quite frustrated at the beginning because it was all in German. During my elective in Taiwan, the German course was fully in Chinese. Only the sections where we had to read some paragraphs of the textbook were in German. This frustration rapidly changed into an eagerness to learn. I studied German back at my home for three to five hours. Almost every day. Moreover, there are a lot of free magazines available in Germany, especially at grocery stores. The great benefit of these free magazines is that they include a lot of pictures of products. It makes it very easy to read and understand, and of course, it is very useful in daily life. The same goes with magazines at the student housing complex or the university: the content is already tailored to my own interests. 

Occasionally, I visited a citizen’s centre in Karlsruhe. Karlsruhe is predominantly perceived as a typical student city, so there are a lot of foreign students in the city. The local government of Karlsruhe decided to organize plenty of events at these citizen centres, like two or three times a week. The great thing about these citizen centres is that there are a lot of locals attending as well. I would join a table with five or six different German seniors to have conversations with them in German. A great opportunity for us, foreigners, to talk and gain hands-on experience in the German language! I do believe that seniors also gain an understanding of different perspectives of students from all places around the world. A win-win situation, I would say. 

Amazing! Sounds like some sort of symbiosis. Do you have any examples of what you have learned in particular from these seniors?

They really offered us a lot of useful tips. Other than the language itself, they also offered us some local survival tips. Like, where can we find the cheapest dairy products? Which grocery shops should we avoid and which farmers market sells the best Käse (cheese)? Especially, about the latter one, the farmers market. The seniors were able to tell us a lot of words concerning agricultural products, so it was quite funny to learn all these different German words. Something I would not expect to learn when arriving in Germany for the very first time.

Cool, so a lot of insider tips. What were some of your biggest struggles regarding the German language and applying it in daily life?

Personally, I believe that the biggest struggle was when I had a conversation with more than one German person. I mean, when I had a one-on-one conversation with a German native speaker, she/he would use easier vocabulary and settle for a slower pace of speaking. But in a group of German native speakers… Their speech might speed up and their topics will change very rapidly. I would then try to comment on something, but most of the time, the topic already changed into something completely different. I think that the solution for this is to grab the keywords. So, at a certain point, I was not trying to understand the whole sentence anymore. It simply takes too much time to comprehend. However, those new topics helped me to identify certain vocabularies and to have a guess at what they were talking about. 

Of course. So, now you are doing your masters programme in Germany (Materials Science and Engineering at the Technical University of Munich). Do you attend classes in English or German and how does that make you feel?

My master’s programme at the TU Munich is like a hybrid one. So, my previous semester was fully in English, but starting from this semester onward some of my courses will be in German. Prior to my acceptance of this masters programme, I also had to get my C1 certification in the German language. 

I have mixed feelings. I am excited, but I also feel a little bit nervous. During my exchange programme in Karlsruhe, I actually attempted to take some courses that were offered in German. However, this was really difficult (I was at a B1/B2 level at the time). One of the biggest difficulties was the technical language (jargon) during the lectures. Terminologies that are used a lot in the German lectures, but seldomly in daily life. So, for example, the German translation for ‘oxygen’ is Sauerstoff and for ‘nitrogen’ it is Stickstoff. I mean… in daily life I would not need to know what ‘nitrogen’ means in German. Anyway, these were the particular difficulties for me. The most effective way to solve this problem, however, is to have a preview of the lecture. Take a look at the slides of the upcoming presentation/lecture and look up what certain elements (like oxygen and nitrogen), bindings and procedures are in the German language. That would be my tip for attending academic lectures in any foreign language.