For most people, the thought of starting a new language isn’t just daunting; it’s pointless. However, throughout high school, while my peers complained about having to take four years of Spanish and wondered why they were wasting their time learning a skill they’d never use once that diploma hit their palms, I hid the fact that I was learning new languages in my free time.

My love for languages started with watching foreign language movies on Netflix. After only ever seeing American and British-made films and TV shows throughout my life, it was refreshing to see the expression of different cultures and attitudes depicted through these films. Eventually, after watching so many foreign language movies, I decided to give learning another language a try. After all, I had always done well in my English classes and easily understood grammar, so why not give myself a challenge and try doing it all in another language?

Each night after finishing my homework, I would pore over dozens of grammar sites to learn about French and Dutch. I would end the night with a short rendezvous in Norwegian. I studied all of them long enough to learn the very basics of each language but not long enough to brag that I could actually speak them.  

Although my flings with each language in high school were short-lived, I was determined to gain full fluency in at least one other language by the time I graduated college.

So, when I discovered that my university had a learning community on campus dedicated solely to intensive language learning, I applied as soon as possible, and my journey with intensive language learning began.

For this endeavor, I decided to pick German as my intensive language. I’d always been interested in German history and wanted to choose a different route from my friends, most of whom were learning Spanish. I’d heard stories from other students about just how intense the environment was going to be: professors spoke to you in the language on day one, you had piles of homework each night, and you had to attend lunches at least three times a week with your class where you would only be able to converse with each other in German.

Most of the other students I spoke to said it wasn’t that bad—that is, if you had some background in the language already. However, I had only taken two years of Spanish in high school and had barely heard a single word of spoken German in my life—I was, to say the least, screwed. I tried to stay hopeful, but I had no idea of the challenges that were about to come.

On the first day of class, I sat quietly in my seat with seven other students. All of us were early, waiting nervously, bouncing our legs underneath our desks. One boy on the other end of the room asked each of us how much German we knew: we all replied that we knew barely anything. He smirked and told us that he’d been using Duolingo—a language learning app for beginners—for the past four months in preparation and that he expected this class to be easy. The rest of us didn’t say a word; we were too nervous thinking that he was right and that we all should have done the same.

When the clock struck ten after, our professor walked in: she was a woman with wild hair, big eyes, and an expression that is meant to be friendly but intimidated me all the same. She looked at all of us individually but said nothing. A pencil rolled off someone’s desk, and it was the loudest thing in the room.

Suddenly, she began speaking German. By her gestures, I assumed she was introducing herself, but I couldn’t understand a word. All eight of us stared at her, eyes wide. Another boy across the room nodded along to her gestures. I wondered, does he know what she’s saying?

Not a single word of English was uttered for the entirety of the lecture. When class was over, she gave us a curt nod and strolled out of the room. The rest of us got up and packed our things, closing our notebooks that had nothing written in them.

I piped up, “Did anyone have any clue as to what she was saying?”

“No idea,” a girl to my left said.

The boy who bragged about using Duolingo for four months shook his head also. “Didn’t recognize a single word.”

After the second day of class, the real coursework began: approximately 200 vocab words to memorize as well as 15 pages of our workbook each week. During lunch, we trudged to a special area of the dining hall where we sat around a large conference table with the expectation of speaking in German. We recited vocabulary to each other until we learned enough to form actual sentences.

Our professor recommended at least three hours of practice each night on top of three hours of daily lecture, which seemed almost impossible when I took into account that I was taking a full credit load. During most lectures, I resorted to just nodding along to whatever my professor said and hoped that she would never call on me. After class, my classmates and I sat around a tiny table in a café on campus and tried to get through our workbooks together, even though we had to use Google Translate to decipher all of the directions before we could even start trying to fill in the answers.

We practiced hours and hours of present tense verb conjugations, strong, weak, and mixed verbs, reflexive pronouns, relative pronouns, and adjective endings. We covered each section of material within only a few days, and we never worked on anything long enough to reach a level of mastery before moving onto the next topic.

After about 5 weeks, we were able to begin stuttering small sentences—simple things with no sustenance, such as “Today, I study in the library,” which didn’t make sense because we hadn’t learned the past tense yet, but it was a start, nonetheless.

By week 12, I had begun subconsciously capitalizing all my nouns in English, just as you do in German. Sometimes, when I spoke English, a German word would pop in occasionally, such as replacing “and” for “und.” On more than one occasion, an English word would be on the tip of my tongue, but I would say the German one instead because it was the first thing that came to mind, usually without even realizing it.

And by week 15…it was finally over. But not really, though; I will have to continue part 2 of the intensive sequence next fall and subsequently take a proficiency test. After that, I will finally be done. But, in the span of just one semester, I’ve made more progress than I ever thought I would have if I had taken a regular-paced course. I was exposed to the spoken and written language every day and was forced to start speaking from day one—something not all regular-paced language classes experience. My vocabulary is still limited, but I can understand the majority of the texts I read, and when I watch German TV shows, I can understand a good portion of the dialogue without subtitles. In fact, I’m even able to recognize when the English subtitles aren’t direct translations.

When starting the language-learning process, most people can’t imagine themselves ever being able to speak a second language, but immersing yourself in an intensive program is the most efficient and effective way to learn. While most of my peers have to take 4 or 5 semesters of a language in order to complete their language requirements at my school, I’m getting it done in two. Additionally, my level of understanding will be much higher than theirs, simply because of the immersion part of the program.

Ultimately, intensive language programs build character and confidence, not to mention the close bond that you’ll share with your classmates as you all struggle and work together to achieve the same goal.

Many people spend years learning things that don’t become applicable until they’ve graduated college or gotten a specific type of job, but when you learn a new language, there are immediate rewards. There’s no better feeling than watching a TV show in a different language and being able to understand most of it or overhearing a conversation in a foreign language spoken on the bus or in the airport and being able to comprehend what the other people are saying.

Despite the long hours of studying, getting frustrated over not being able to grasp certain grammatical concepts, and being insecure about my accent, I would do it all over again from scratch in a heartbeat. Looking back on it, was it hard? Of course! Do I still have a long way to go until I’m fluent? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Hell yes!