It strikes me as I go through the my daily routine in Tübingen that everybody around me has also read the script for daily life that we learned that day in class.   I.e., on any given day, perhaps we’ll have “rehearsed” the scene where I’m  the person wanting to buy oranges in the market, while my classmate plays the role of the orange vendor. These little practice dialogs are cute, and good for spoken language practice, but while in class it all seems removed from a real world setting.

However,  later that day, when I go to buy oranges in the real world,  it turns out the orange vendor has been given the same script that my classmate used when he played the orange vendor in class. I’m always taken aback when this happens – why should the orange vendor have been reading the beginning German course book?

Plus, random snatches of conversations that I overhear suddenly seem to include all the vocabulary we learned that day in class, where as they didn’t the day before. But  how come all these people know what our word list was like today? Do all the people in town get a memo every morning alerting them to the words to use for the day?

OK, I know what you’re thinking.  And no,  I’m not really that crazy.  😉

I do recognize that what’s really happening is that the dialogs we practice in class are based on real types of conversations you have in German.  And the words we’re learning in general are the ones that people really use in everyday life. The course is obviously doing a good job of introducing us to practical vocabulary that we can immediately  apply to real-world situations.

So, once I’ve learned a standard conversational pattern, or new piece of vocabulary, I’m more likely to recognize someone saying it when I hear it. It’s the same phenomena I find in English, actually – when I hear a new English word, I suddenly start to hear it being used all over the place, even though I’d never noticed the word before.

I guess the difference when you’re learning a foreign language is that there are a lot of new words you’re learning each day. So, the sheer number of words you suddenly recognize in use after you’ve learned them takes that basic experience and exponentially increases the impact of it.

I know that this is the logical explanation for what’s happening.

But still, I can’t completely  shake the feeling that everyone around me has read the same script for the German-language play in which we’re all taking part: