Until last month.

Last month I gave a little house and started renovating. Now, you should probably know that I am one of those people who doesn’t have a clue about building. I would have liked to keep it that way, but then some nice people gave me my little house for free, just because they didn’t feel like doing any of the work that it needed. So I grudgingly, hopefully, decided I would try.

But the only thing I’d ever built in my 27 years was a CD shelf. It was a good shelf, but didn’t really prepare me for re-siding and insulating a little house. So I started asking people for advice. Everyone had suggestions, probably really good suggestions, but suggestions involving a lot of words that I didn’t understand. I would leave a conversation about construction with a pounding head and no clue as to what it was they were trying to tell me.

You think you know a language, and then you get involved in something specialized like carpentry, and all of the sudden you’re back at the beginning, the way you felt sitting in the language classroom those first few years, wondering if any of it was ever going to make any sense.

My first time at the building supply store is a nightmare. A nightmare because it seems set up to hide the cheapest and most useful products from you in the least likely places, and a nightmare because some of the people I live with had given me a list of things they needed, and I found out too late that I had no idea what any of it was. Instead I paced the isles for almost an hour, until I completely accidentally found a stand with signs on it for the things my friends had requested. Nothing like a foreign language to humble you, to remind you that there is still so much you don’t know, still so many situations left to challenge and try you.

So I’ve been back at studying vocabulary again. Leiste. (Molding!) Balken. (Beam!) Isolierung. (Sounds like “isolation”? Wrong! It means insulation. So if you ever hear a native German speaker saying that they are trying to isolate their house, you will now know what it is they actually mean.) And ever so slowly I have begun to be able to articulate what it is that I mean when asking for advice and to understand what my carpenter friends are telling me I should do.

Now, because I’m learning both the vocabulary and the concepts for the first time in German, the problem is that when I try to tell my American friends about it in English, I don’t know any of the words.

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If you want to get started with learning German or just learn a few words and phrases, then check out our Starter Kit on the Young Germany Website