"Yes, I'm Australian. Yes, I speak German."

"Where are you from?"
"Australia."
"But you speak German?"
"Yes."
"Why?"


I am very aware that it is unusual for both to be true simultaneously, especially for someone who doesn’t have a German Opa or Austrian Oma. I was one of only two such students in the advanced German program at my university, and this classmate and I bonded so well over our shared lack of German-speaking ancestry in the department that we’ve now been good friends for the better part of a decade.

The point where she and I met is already ten years into my German experience, so let me go back to the start of the story, of how I came to be fluent in German. This is after all an answer to the question I am asked the most by strangers when they first discover my linguistic abilities, so I feel I should tell the story properly, and start at the very beginning… a very good place to start.

1992. I was nine, and in my own personal hell, otherwise known as grade five at a Melbourne primary school. I loved learning, but my female classmates made my life a misery. Halfway through the year, my mum and dad sat me down at the family room table one afternoon, for a conversation that changed my life. I knew I would be able to escape primary school at the end of the following year and start high school – a P-12 school, the same school my grandmother had attended, and most importantly, a school that none of my vindictive classmates would be going to. That afternoon however, my parents offered me the option of starting there a year early - at the start of grade 6 - and I grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

At this school, language instruction began at early primary level; each year learned either German or French, which not only enabled but encouraged continuity into the senior levels – a rare example of excellent language teaching policy.

In early February 1993, I had my first German lesson. Everyone else in my class had between one and six years up on me, but I managed to pick up on everything they’d covered previously in a few months, and by the end of the year, I was winning maths races, singing songs, describing pictures, and introducing myself, all in German. This gave me a significant advantage over all of the newcomers at the start of year 7, and by the end of the year I was really enjoying it – not just German, but learning a language. At the start of year eight, we had the chance to choose electives: to keep German alone, to add either Japanese or French to the mix, to trade German for one of the other two, or to drop languages completely. I tried to convince my teachers to let me keep German and add French and Japanese, to no avail, and had to settle for German and French.

I continued with both throughout high school, and did well, both in class and in various regional and state level competitions. When the topic of VCE (A Levels) subjects came up, German and French were always a part of the discussion. At the end of year 11, I travelled to Germany for the first time, and spent six weeks in Kiel over Christmas in 1998. That trip warrants its own post, but by the time I returned to Melbourne (despite begging my mum to let me do my senior year in Germany), I took on year 12 German with a vengeance, well enough to get me into my number one university course at Monash University. I transferred into the languages program and traded French for Italian after the first year, and graduated with a double major in German and Linguistics in 2004.

From September 2004, I spent a year as a foreign language assistant at a high school in rural south-west Germany, which again warrants its own posts, and this is where I learned to truly love German. Living in the community and speaking it every day – with colleagues, with my landlord and his wife and with everyone else in the town enabled me to transition from German skills learned from a book to fluent German, and I’ve never looked back. A little over two years after I returned from that trip, and with a teaching degree in German and ESL under my belt, I bought myself a one-way ticket to Berlin, and have been living here ever since, with no immediate plans to return to Australia.

And that is how I am both Australian and fluent in German with no germanophone heritage to speak of.
Questions, comments?