Haha, no, no Italian John 🙂 I speak French as well -or better, I used to speak French. Nowadays, I think I forgot every single word, though; it’s been so long since I last spoke French.

This is inspiring stuff, George. To be able to speak three languages is unbelievable! You probably speak Italian as well.

Hey John!

In daily life, talks with friends, or basic bureaucratic stuff, I can say that I’m rather fluent in German. In deep philosophical topics or discussions that request special terminology, I think that I’m more limited. I guess you never really learn a foreign language, but a certain degree of fluency is achievable for sure.

When I moved to Germany eleven years ago, I didn’t speak a single word of German. I think I only knew Danke (thanks) but not even Bitte (please, or you’re welcome). A decision I took back then was not to hang out with Greeks or people speaking English. The reason was that I’d never learn German. Speaking Greek all the time would somehow “shelter” me, but knowing myself, I’d never try to learn German. The same thing would happen if I talked English all the time. That said, I wanted to motivate myself to learn the language. I truly believe that if you don’t speak the local language, you always remain some sort of visitor/tourist/traveler/whatever-in-between-all-that.

The process was rather simple. I bought several books on German grammar and a dictionary. I’d study every day on my own for two years, I’d overhear the dialogues in the streets, and I’d “force” my German friends to talk to me in German and -somehow- accept my language mistakes. After two-three years, I took some private classes for a couple of months with a teacher, and she solved all the questions I gathered during the initial period of my stay in Berlin. Slowly, I started to talk better German -and this is an ongoing process.

Nowadays, some of my best friends in Berlin are Greeks or people speaking English (apart from Germans, of course). Berlin is a melting pot of cultures, and communicating in English makes it easier to hang out with people from different countries. Still, to this day, I believe that I wouldn’t have learned a single word of German if I didn’t push myself to learn the language during the first couple of years. There are easier ways to learn German in Berlin, like for example going to a school. I just didn’t have so much time back then, and for an extended period of time, I couldn’t also afford it.