Andrew Parsons Foreign Exchange Student at large

Learning a language while living im Ausland is quite the adventure. It’s simultaneously incredibly difficult while surprisingly easy, completely lackluster but full of hilarious mistakes.

I’ve been asked time and time again what being immersed in and learning German was like, especially during my first few months on exchange. I couldn’t really give a straight answer; language immersion is a bizarre experience that one can only endure in order to imagine and relate. However a large portion of my readership hasn’t had the opportunity of language immersion, so my answer was far from satisfying.

…but here’s answer that you’ve been waiting for.

This all began with falling down the Wikipedia Rabbithole (relevant xkcd), a time-wasting mistake joyous adventure that we are all undoubtedly familiar with (alternatively, emerging from YouTube three hours later).

List of Unicode Characters > Diaeresis (diacritic) > Germanic umlaut > Old English > Middle English > West-Frisian —time-warp—> YouTube > ……

…and I finally landed on this illustrative video. Take a moment and watch the first 2 minutes of the video before you continue reading.

Verstehen Sie? I didn’t think so. Frustrated? Most likely. You know that it is English, but it makes absolutely no sense.

Next came the equally illustrative video, “Prisecolinensinenciousol.”

“Prisecolinensinenciousol, a parody by Adriano Celentano for the Italian TV [show] Mileluci is sung entirely in gibberish designed to sound like American English.”

Undoubtedly this is what language immersion feels like.