Learning German with Dr. Naumann
Written by Vivian Hughbanks
Learning to talk is hard. It takes a long time, it’s frustrating, and it requires extreme patience from the teacher. Most people learn to speak from their parents and a sibling or two.
When learning a second language—especially from word number one—the process is a whole lot more frustrating and requires infinitely more conscious effort than learning a mother tongue at two years old. It also requires infinitely more patience from the teacher.
I walked into my very first German class at 8:53 a.m. on the first day of my sophomore year, and I was completely intimidated.
My professor was Dr. Stephen Naumann.
After the first 50 minutes, I knew how to ask and answer three questions in German: “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” and “What are you studying?” Feeling accomplished, I began to think that maybe the next three semesters of core-required language learning might not be so bad.
Since then, Dr. Naumann has told me that he teaches his first classes this way on purpose: if a student feels comfortable with a little of a new language on the first day, the rest of the process seems a lot less intimidating. He encourages students to speak as much as possible from the very beginning, without fear of grammatical errors. Through the errors, the learning process grows.
Many students at Hillsdale learn their first words in German from Dr. Naumann. To me, making a foreign language seem unintimidating is his greatest skill as a professor. Becoming accustomed to the sound of the new vocabulary and the cadence of sentence structure is impossible without speaking, and students speak as little as possible when they are scared. He makes it not scary.
From those very first weeks of class, when I ran into him in the cafeteria or at events around campus, Dr. Naumann would greet me in German—my first encounter with another language outside of a classroom. With each interaction, the intimidation wore away.
Dr. Naumann himself is seven-eighths German. His great-grandfather emigrated from Dresden to St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1870s to study theology. Dr. Naumann first encountered the language through his parents, who would speak to each other in German when they didn’t want the kids to know what was going on. He began serious study of the language in middle school, and after a visit to Germany in high school, he promised himself that he would return. He received his doctorate in German studies from Michigan State University in 2012 and has visited Germany every year since high school.
It’s been two years since I learned my first German words, and I’ve now declared the major. I spent a good deal of last summer studying in Germany, and I’m looking for ways to go back after graduation next May.
One of my most treasured Hillsdale memories took place in Berlin with the Würzburg study abroad program last July. After hours of grammar, Goethe and the Deutsche Bahn, our group went for an evening stroll through the city.
We paused in front of the iconically towering Brandenburg Gate, its six columns glowing brightly through the darkness. Atop the gate, its four bronze horses seemed to gallop proudly before their mistress Eirene, the goddess of peace.
Surrounded by selfie-taking tourists, a few of us gathered around Dr. Naumann to ask questions about the architecture and history of Berlin. Prior to coming to Hillsdale, Dr. Naumann had lived in Berlin, and could give us an insider’s look at the historical and cultural identity of the city. There, standing before the icon of Germany, I encountered ideas about the intersection of society, history, and their construction in a way that I never had before—and I was thinking these things in another language.
Each of my professors at Hillsdale has been excellent in their own way. I encountered the ideas that shaped the Western Heritage with Dr. Birzer; I pondered the forms of Plato and the physics of Aristotle with Dr. Cole; and I learned to read as never before with Dr. Smith (I still hear his voice in my head when I read Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky).
Dr. Naumann opened the door to a whole new previously inaccessible world of literature, art, news, music, and film—and removed my fear of walking through.
Vivian Hughbanks, ’16, is a politics and German major from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and a member of the Dow Journalism Program. Fueled with coffee, she de-stresses by cooking and forcing food on anyone in close proximity. She tries not to get lost (and fails regularly), and occasionally jumps into lakes for no reason.