"May cause heightened awareness of language" - this warning label should come with every glossy brochure in the ten-pound package of paper meted out by international moving company reps.
This warning is easy to agree on. There should be others, though, for instance "May engender false linguistic friends", or - specifically for countries like Germany - "New language may cause insomnia and depression".
As handy as these awareness pointers are, you will invariably get that comic book like feeling of a 2-foot-diameter speech bubble hanging over your head with only a huge, fat, sublimely rounded, Uber-question mark inside.
What triggers it, will depend on happenstance, but one of our favorites is "mein Handy ist kaputt".
A cell phone is handy, no doubt, but calling the contraption a "Handy", it's question mark time for us!
So, somewhere along the way of linguistic awareness, we are taught that concepts expressed by words are sometimes so unique that they do not translate. That German "Gemuetlichkeit" is still floating around in this mental space, making many students resign themselves to the fact that they are forever excluded from experiencing that specific German feeling of comfort, coziness and home which babies around here suckle up as Gemuetlichkeit.
Our view is that "Gemuetlichkeit" is just a con for gullible foreigners: an Uber-Ersatz concept that is totally kaput.
Learning a new language does pose a challenge to your brain, to the muscles of your jaw and mouth and to many concepts you hold dearly, but many of the typical examples given for that are just dead wrong.
Language spans the arc from the inanely practical to the far out abstract, the dark matter of philosophical treatise. Here's the secret: no single person masters all of it.
Sure, the formal and informal versions of "you" are difficult, and some German words are as long and as painful as a bullwhip, but you can still get by pretty darn well with some sustained effort on duolingo. For free.
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