Keio Girls Senior High School: "German Connects to and Enriches University Life"

I have been involved in music for a long time, and now I play the horn in the university's Wagner Society Orchestra. I was also in Wagner during my time at Keio Girls Senior High School. When you are involved in music, you have many opportunities to see scores by German and Austrian composers, and instructions are written there in German. I was thinking, "It would be nice if I could understand the meaning myself," when a senior who was studying German in the multilingual education program at the high school advised me, "German classes are small, and there are many opportunities to speak, so it's fun." That was the catalyst for me to try learning it.

Like Ms. Yamataki, music was my inspiration. I currently play percussion in a wind ensemble. At Keio Girls Senior High School, I was in the Mandolin Club, but I also play the piano. Piano scores have instructions, of course, and choral scores sometimes have German lyrics. I thought that the quality of the performance would change depending on whether I played with an understanding of the meaning or without it, and that is what inspired me to study German.

Yes. At Keio Girls Senior High School, in addition to German, Chinese and French are options for a second foreign language. While Chinese has similarities to Japanese, such as the use of kanji, German and French are languages you won't understand unless you study them from scratch. But I thought if I was going to do it, I wanted to feel like it was worth the effort, and I also wanted to learn a language spoken in a region where English isn't the primary language. That was another reason I chose German.

There is a song by Schumann called "Widmung" (Dedication), and the score for this song actually has lyrics written in it. Thanks to studying German, I could pick out the meaning of individual words, but I couldn't understand the meaning of the whole sentence because there were some old German notations. If I have the chance, I would like to play it again after understanding all the meanings myself.

I took classes in my second and third years. In the second year, there is one double-period class per week, and in the third year, there is an additional single-period class on a different day.

As my senior said, it was a small class, so I was grateful for the atmosphere where I felt I could ask anything. The content of the class focused on grammar, but I was able to ask questions immediately if there was something I didn't understand.

Ms. Okuyama, who was in charge, lived in Germany as a child, and it was memorable how she taught us how to actually use grammar by sharing episodes from that time. Also, during events like Christmas, the teacher would bring German sweets like Stollen, which was fun.

In the third year, for one period, we were taught by a native speaker, Ms. Francesca Litt. During that class, both Japanese and English were forbidden; it was a German-only class. We worked hard to understand what Ms. Litt said in German, and we would respond in German as well.

In other classes, we might end up explaining things in Japanese, but that wasn't allowed in this class. So even if we didn't know every single word, we tried to understand the content, and the teacher also tried to understand what we wanted to say. Because there was such a serious relationship, my motivation was naturally drawn out, and I came to feel that speaking German is fun and that I wanted to speak more. It was hard, but having a class with a native teacher was a big deal for me.

The students planned a Christmas party and played games. We did things like word unscrambling games using German.

It was very fun.

With English, I felt more like I was "made to learn" it rather than learning it myself, but because German was a language I wanted to learn on my own, I felt a great sense of accomplishment. After learning the grammar once through, I was very happy to be able to roughly understand what was being said. There are many expressions that differ from English, and I could see the differences in the culture and ways of thinking behind the language, which made me feel really glad I was doing a multilingual study.

What I found interesting was that in German, the grammar is flexible, and any word can come at the beginning. For example, in English, I think cases where the object comes before the subject are rare except in special circumstances, but in German, you can tell who is speaking based on the articles and verb conjugations, so it's interesting that it makes sense even if the order is swapped.

What made me glad I studied German at Keio Girls Senior High School was that I could take classes with lively, practical German. You can learn grammar at university too, but Ms. Okuyama's classes were based on real experiences and included local trivia, so they were easy to understand and memorable.

Also, the native teacher Ms. Litt's classes and tests emphasized conversation, and there were many opportunities to actually talk with the teacher, which is something you can't easily do at university.

Yes. For example, in the English subjunctive, we say things like "If I were...", but to be honest, I didn't understand why we use "were." However, after hearing that it is based on German grammar, I was able to make sense of it.

Encountering English after learning German leads to new discoveries. English and German have similarities, and things like relative pronouns are very similar in concept. By learning German, there were more points where I could better understand English grammar as well.

Compared to those who haven't studied it, I think I have less of a sense of dislike toward a second foreign language. However, during high school, I inevitably prioritized subjects related to internal progression during exam periods, and to be honest, there was some grammar I had started to forget. But by learning it again at university like this, I can firmly fix the grammar in my head, and by understanding it based on the university professor's teaching style, I can learn the same grammar from a different perspective. I feel like I am "learning more usable German."

The professor teaching me at university now is someone who has faced "German as a language" and puts a lot of care into "how to teach German to us." Because of that, they teach grammar in great detail, so I have a strange sensation as if I am now reorganizing and learning the German I studied desperately for two years in high school. It's like I'm connecting the "dots" I learned back then into a "line." I feel like I'm mapping out the whole picture now.

Regarding the song "Widmung" I mentioned earlier, there is a part in the musical notation that says, "Gradually get louder and play the loudest here." When I deciphered the instructions written in German there, it said to play the chord for "you (Du)" in the lyrics—as in "It is you who thinks this way"—the strongest. By playing with that in mind, I was able to perform with a strong feeling of "I dedicate this to you," just as the title "Widmung" suggests.

Also, when looking at scores, there are inevitably musical symbols I don't know, and I look up the meaning then. I happened to see the word "langsam," which corresponds to the English "slow," written near a symbol. Thanks to studying German, I knew what it meant without having to look it up.

This is a story from when I was performing a piece by Wagner, but the instruction "gewichtig" was written on the score. When I looked it up in a dictionary, it only came up as "heavily," but this is a derivative of "wichtig," which means "important" in English. Once I understood that, I grasped the nuance that "this part should be played with importance." That was a moment when I felt glad I was studying German.

Also, since entering university, I've had the chance to be conducted by a teacher living in Germany. The teacher gives instructions in German, and it's fun to understand what they mean.

I haven't had many opportunities to see operas yet, but I'd like to. I want to try watching German versions too.

As an immediate goal, I'm going to Europe on a Wagner Society performance tour in my fourth year. We're going to Germany too, so I want to try talking to the locals in German.

From February to March this year (2025), I will be doing a short-term study abroad at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, and I'm looking forward to communicating with the locals in German there. I want to see how well my German works in practice.

Also, I hear there will be opportunities to interact with people there who are learning Japanese, so I definitely want to know how we look from their perspective and learn about the ways of thinking and culture they can teach me.