December 23 marks my last day in the U.S. for the rest of my life as a U.S. citizen making a permanent move to Germany. We’ve flown twice to start the procedure of getting me accustom to Germany and now this visit is part one of moving. Ask me anything within reason! Cheers!
Congratulations! That is so exciting you will be making a permanent move. I am curious as someone with a German spouse, how long did it take you to learn the language? I’ve been studying for around 2 years and while I feel like I am making ample progress, I want to ensure that I am well-prepared when I do end up looking to immigrate to Germany.
Thank you!
I will be fully honest. I’ve been learning German on and off since we married. So I started 10 years ago and we visited Germany once a year for a few years (so in the lead up to those visits I got much more serious about constant rigorous study), but it wasn’t until I had my kid and spending more time in Germany that certain things clicked. Of course that’s in between full time job and life (we’ve moved states a few times in there too) and now being a mother.
I think everyone is different, but in my situation immersion helped the most and I tend to do well in self-study. Now to be further honest the dialect we speak at home here in Germany is a different level of hard sometimes because the words and sentences are different than Hochdeutsch (best relevant example I can think of is I mog di (ich mag dich) but again immersion has helped that too. You may have seen that at the store on Lebkuchen, but that dialect is close to what I hear everyday.
How often are you visiting and when do you guys plan to move? Wishing you luck and good German before then because I think it makes the difference immensely and genuinely.
People do look at me and expect me not to speak German (am the American spouse of color), but are surprised and pleased when I do. So far it has led to an easing up so to speak with paperwork and the like…we really do live out in the boonies now. 😂
But also to be fair for those that know our family there are no holds barred only my sister in law will speak English to me as a last resort. The store clerks may speak English very rarely but once they realize I understand they switch back with a quickness to German.