My own experience with German goes back to my childhood. Back when I was a kid there weren’t many TV stations to choose from and there was no Internet, so no YouTube or Netflix. We had three Dutch TV-stations and the offer wasn’t always great. Therefore my parents sometimes watched German TV. Even though I didn’t understand most of it, I got familiar with hearing German.
I really started learning German at age 13, when I got my first lessons in school. I had German in school for about six years, but as with most languages I only really started to speak it well when I got to use it on a regular basis. When I was in college for tourism I did several summer season jobs on campsites in Germany. My final internship was at a sailing school in the North of the Netherlands where most guests were German school groups. After each of those experiences my German got better and better.
Since German is the second most commonly spoken language in Europe it’s hard not to encounter it. German speaking people are simply everywhere. I’ve got some very close German friends who I met while working and studying abroad. Germans also make up the second largest group of foreigners living in the Netherlands where I grew up and currently live again. So, it’s not remarkable at all that the love of my life is German too.
I met my husband in 2012. Even though he speaks Dutch like a Dutch person, being with him made it easy for me to perfect my German to near fluency. That made me decide to study for a German language teacher certification besides the Spanish one I was already studying for. In 2018 I graduated as a German teacher and I’ve been teaching it in secondary schools since 2015.