Of perspective clients abroad and German Book clubs
It was towards the end of summer 2023 that I had been — once more — in contact with a German recruiting agency. There was the possibility of working on a change management project as an external consultant.
The prospect of traveling a bit more and of visiting my beloved Germany — a country I am very much fond of and which is literally around the corner — looked really exciting, although the project in itself was not so enticing.
It did not work out for the best that time. As usual, the reasons are manifold.
What I took from the experience, on top of the fact that the market for L&D freelancers is fluid and very tiny in Germany, was that my German needed to get back to the pre-2017 levels. I.e. the times when I was a citizen of Berlin.
Although I had no issue whatsoever in understanding and reading the language (via a phone call or in person, or while enjoying a digital subscription to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung), I had noticed a slower ability in the production of sentences. Which is not what you want your prospects to experience at all, right?
While talking to German speaking friends around the same period, I also felt less and less of a flawless ability to express myself.
Which is WHY I looked for a course at the local Goethe Institut, the first time in my life I opted for this institution ( back in my Berlin days, the option was out of question due to its costs, which were 30 to 40% more expensive than other very good schools).
The C2 level course was not offered and I was redirected to a C1 evening course, whose focus was conversation. ( And in case you had no idea what C1 or C2 mean, google “Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)“).
In the beginning I was a bit skeptical and wondered how much I could get out of it. When it is your own money you put into such an undertaking — money that I could otherwise save or use for my own business — you’d rather think twice more often about it.
Indeed, it felt challenging to sit with so many participants, whose level was so diverse and at times not C1-like. Some did not possess the ability to converse on a topic they were knowledgeable of, just as an example.
And yet, it helped me a lot to re-establish the confidence in using the language regularly and to rediscover the side of me that comes out when I speak and act in German.
Long story short, I have now confidently applied for other projects based in Germany (none of them became reality, sadly enough).
More importantly is that I persuaded some of the course participants to create an Amsterdam-based German book club! We are 7 people of different nationalities, reading a German novel every 6 to 8 weeks, on average. Think about that!
I decided to call it Schmökern, a German word which translates as to read leisurely, to delve into a book or magazine.( I shall post the books we have read so far in the comments).
What I learnt from this process can be summarized as follows.
Get something positive out of all your experiences
I learnt a lot in that course, although at moments I felt less challenged that I would have liked. But now I do have a group of people I am in contact with. Our common interest is what has bound us in the beginning.
Establish basic principles every time you engage with people
I thought that it was important to establish some guiding principles and I only created the group once everybody agreed upon a few sentences about WHY we meet, what we do and how we treat each other.
It does not need to be set in stones forever but it is necessary and a good exercise in thinking about everybody and not only about your own perspective (FYI my suggestion was accepted without any discussion)
Adjust as you go
The most important thing about our book club is having fun both while we meet and while we read a book.
WhatsApp helps in taking decisions together and in organizing the next meeting. Apart from that every meeting represents an opportunity to adjust our club.
Coming together is better than discussing the merit of a novel
Whether you look at it from the perspective of well being or new acquired skills, meet-ups are the best feature of this club. We are currently trying to figure out how to accommodate the attendance of a member who just relocated for good to the US.
My take is that physical encounters should not be ditched, although the temptation of a virtual meeting scores high on everybody’s minds.
Are you also trying to become fluent in a foreign language? Or are you tinkering with the idea of joining a book club? Or of creating one?
Let me know or drop a comment.
