Like most kids in Australia, I had an overwhelmingly monolingual childhood. Everyone else in my family only speaks English, and I would’ve been destined to follow in their footsteps if it hadn’t been for the internet.
I had a couple of years of basic French during primary school, a year of compulsory Japanese at the start of high school, and Mandarin classes on and off throughout my school career, but my real passion for language learning was sparked in 2013 when I accidentally stumbled upon the world of German YouTube and naturally decided that the only logical course of action was to start teaching it to myself immediately.
I continued to work on my German while enrolled in a correspondence education program for students to earn credits for learning a language not offered on campus at their own high school, though I was disappointed to find that I had somehow covered everything we were being taught on my own already, and that the course I was in didn’t really have anything new to offer me. It was around this point that I knew I’d discovered the secret sauce that traditional curriculums just don’t serve enough of – consistent exposure to real engaging native content.
In 2015, the curiosity I’d developed from reading about mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages got the better of me, and I picked up Norwegian. By the time I finished high school at the end of 2016, I was fluent in German; I could understand virtually any content I wanted to read or watch, and could easily pass as a native when writing and speaking. In 2017 I started learning Dutch, and finally went to Germany for the first time to live there for a year as an au pair, staying with a family in Hamburg and looking after their four young children.
Since returning to Australia I’ve continued to work in early childhood education, and was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2019. My original plans of moving to Europe having been set back by the pandemic, in 2022 I finally signed up for the Goethe-Zertifikat C2 with the intention of applying for jobs in Germany. Despite passing the exam, I ended up staying in Sydney and working in a bilingual German/English preschool, an experience which I had been dreaming of for years, and yet one that I was unfortunately rather underwhelmed by.
Stung by the slap of reality dealt by my employment situation and in dire need of a dopamine hit, I started learning Japanese again under my own steam, which allowed me to fall in love with the acquisition process all over again as an adult, and come to the realisation that I can achieve true language bliss without relocating to the other side of the world. I’ve since returned to my old monolingual teaching job, but I couldn’t be happier. I’m currently planning to visit Japan for my 2 year learning anniversary.
language o’clock 