You don’t have to know German before you have learned it.

Are you intimidated by a new German book? You might be like one of my clients, who, after the comfort developed by having spent time working through the A1 materials, looked at the A2 book for the very first time and said, “But I can’t do that! It’s too advanced for me.” Except she had never worked on the materials in the A2 level before. So I reminded her, “Remember that you don't have to know anything until you've learned it and worked on it for a while.”

Focus on acquiring German language skills, not on ‘making the grade.’

Learning is nonlinear and also invisible. So how do you know you’ve learned, for example, dass + Nebensatz? You know you’ve learned it when you feel relatively comfortable executing it in conversation auf Deutsch. This is why we use self-assessment to make this visual. We don’t use grades here. Ever.

Because we have a formalized and rigid (and frankly quite out-of-date) school system, we are steeped in formalized education from the time we enter kindergarten, and for a lot of children, even before that. This create an immense amount of pressure because our educational system is based on performance. Grades are a form of performance, because a grade is not something you earn, it’s something bestowed upon you. And if you’ve had similar experiences to mine, you'll often have good teachers, however occasionally you’ll have a teacher who has got it in for you, and even if you might have fulfilled the requirements, that toxic teacher wielding the imaginary power of grades can easily misrepresent your performance in that system.

What if, instead, we focused on individual competencies? (Competencies, meaning skills, is not a term we use often in the US.) What if you could begin to collect those skills like tools in a toolbox? You would begin to see over time, that when you put all of those individual competencies, those individual tools, together, that they are gestalt and they create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

How the initial discomfort will fade:

Especially if you’re ein helles Köpfchen (a smart cookie), the following may have been required of you throughout your life: walk into a room and know what to do, because no one else in that room does, but you know how to figure it out, and since you do that a lot, people think you always know what you’re doing. You know what I mean?

When you are then in a German class and you haven’t yet learned what TO DO, then it can be quite uncomfortable. When you can then turn your focus to the skills which you have learned and the competencies which you have acquired, and you focus on saying what you can say, then the discomfort begins to fade. You then operate from a locus of functionality instead of a locus of performance.

It’s similar to hiking, actually. First focus on the path which lies before you, much as you’d pay attention to the path when you go for a hike. If you walk through a wooded area before you reach the footbridge over a pond, then first you must walk through the wooded area. It won’t happen any other way.

Focus on what’s right in front of you, focus on the path, focus on acquiring skills, and you’ll soon see that what you have learned already has made you capable, and as you add more German language skills to your ‘toolbox,’ your comfort will increase and the discomfort fades away.

Because you don’t have to know German before you have learned it.

Und das ist gut so.