The latest video on Easy German depicts a visit to the Foreign Service Institute in Washington DC where three diplomats are readying for a C1 examination before being posted to Germany and Austria.
Of course they have excellent conditions and supportive teachers. They are also paid to learn the language, as opposed to most language learners doing their language acquisition in their spare time as a hobby. But as their teacher notes, they possess serious motivation, put in five hours classroom work and three hours homework every day, and above all, they must exhibit “Dranbleiben” in darker moments of self-doubt [keep at it, stick with it, hang on in… etc]
The subtitles are, as usual, in German and English.
Make up your own mind as to the range and depth of their language skills, and there are already plenty of sceptics as to their C1 status in the comments below the video.
But there can be no doubt as to the commitment and enthusiasm of these diplomats.
And as their teacher notes, from her 26 years of teaching diplomats, one factor that is not so important in language acquisition is “talent”, which gives hope for plenty of us…
Indeed. I’m sure good quality expensive tuition plays an important role.
In general the role of talent in mastering a discipline is disputed. I recommend books by Matthew Syed, who maintains that hard work and discipline, along with luck, are far more important than any supposed natural talent. And yet most people I speak to believe firmly in the concept of natural talent as the explanation for success.
To be fair, it is impossible to judge someones skills in a language solely based on a short interview, especially considering that language also means using it in its written form, and that those people are trained the language for a specific purpose, in which they need to excel. However, besides them having an accent and making some grammar mistakes here and there (not all of them to the same degree, though), all of them are easy to understand and don’t sound awkward or limited in the way they express.
The only persons who claim that it would be important are those who use their “lack of talent” as an excuse to never try. I would assume that anyone who’s ever learned something and has reached a high proficiency should have made the experience that, in the end, it all comes down to hard work.
The gegendere is brutal. I was wondering why they are just training female diplomats. Until I saw in the subtitles this misspelling: Diplomat*innen. Whether you jam an asterix into a word or not does not change its meaning, it’s just misspelled. Whether you jam a glottal stop into a place where it does not belong or not does not change the meaning either, it’s just mispronounced. In this case, it even hurts in the ears.
If you have some foreign accent, you will be forgiven. But if you have a native accent like Anna and the reporter then you make yourself very unpopular. Simply because it’s clear then that they do on purpose annoying people. That’s simply wrong German.
