I fell in love with German - the language - when, my sophomore year as a college chorister, we sang "Still, Still, Still" in our Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. I LOVED that hymn, partly because it's a sweet lullaby for Baby Jesus, but also specifically because we sang all three verses in German. It was my first experience with the language, even though my Dad's ancestry is German, and close enough to his generation that his father, my Papa, still probably cursed in German. (I know there were a few phrases my Dad heard frequently - not curse words, but little things like "Salz und Pfeffer" and "heiß wie alles.")
Anyway, the German for Still, still, still is beautiful and I wanted to know more about it after that concert, so the very next semester I signed up for German 101. I was glad that several music-major friends had also signed up, since they frequently had to perform art songs in German. I felt like it was a perfect fit for me, since I was majoring in French already. A master of languages! Multi-talented! Multi-lingual! I would be a language superstar. Except... German is HARD. And very different from any romance language, as any student of languages knows. The instructor was not very patient or kind (we used to shrug and say, "Welp, she's very German!" but I know that we shouldn't stereotype anyone that way, and I have a lot of supremely kind German friends now), and that made it even harder.
So "101" was as far as my German education went, until I started working at my current job. Its global headquarters is located in Raubling, near Munich, and I do still love hearing the language on occassion. Like just now, the Chairman of the Board and CFO were just hanging around the copy room, right by my cubicle, chatting away. The (company) Germans visit our office pretty frequently, or we Skype with team members and overhear other conversations. I love it -- I still try to pick out words I think I remember. It makes me wish very much that I had stuck with it.
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