I genuinely struggled to imagine, when I first began learning German, a point in the future at which I would arrive at something resembling fluency. Everything about my first few steps and those that followed felt staccato-like and stilted. There were phonetic gestures my tongue felt incapable of making. My partner would often intervene when I mispronounced a word to correct my sound, and I frankly couldn’t tell the difference between what was being emitted from my mouth and from his. The nuances were lost on me. I never doubted that I would eventually get to a point where making a sentence wouldn’t feel like a linguistic and semantic ordeal, I just couldn’t anticipate how long it would take for my brain to be rewired so that basic structures felt habitual and familiar.

The most difficult part of learning German was understanding, acknowledging, and accepting that a verb could only ever be in certain positions within a sentence. You couldn’t move them around. If one was using a modal verb, like must or want, it appeared in second position while the main verb is fated to appear at the end of the sentence with all other details like time-manner-place fitted in between.However, if one was forming a subordinate clause, both verbs had to appear at the end. This rigidity was hard to swallow, especially for someone who grew up not speaking the Queen’s English but Goan English, which honestly sounds like Konkani spoken in translation.