This past Saturday I was driving around Fairfax County in the rain, running errands and listening to podcasts. As I listened to Filme und so, the German movie-review podcast with Annik Rubens and Timo Hetzel, I realized that podcast is just about the only place I get information on new and soon-to-be-released movies nowadays. Annik and Timo are great reviewers and film experts, and theirs is an interesting program that is easy for a fluent non-native speaker of German to understand.

(I’m fascinated to see that Simran has posted pictures of Annik and Timo, from the first video version of their podcast that he had seen.)

It’s a bit funny that I’m getting my film news almost exclusively from Filme und so, because the original reasons I subscribed to it were that Annik Rubens, a podcasting colleague and acquaintance, is half of the team, and that it was one more way for me to listen to “real” German on a regular basis.

I am a 20-year-veteran German teacher with a Ph.D. in German from Vanderbilt University; I’ve published two books and some articles on German literature, etc., etc. Yet I probably will always feel inadequate as a speaker of German. I never lived in German-speaking Europe for more than four weeks at a time, I didn’t spend any growing-up years there, I am not married to a German, nor did I hear it spoken at home as I was growing up.

This is all to say that I never had a real, true, undiluted immersion in the German language. I can’t afford to travel to central Europe frequently, so I go there every two summers or so with American high school students. This is, of course, an intrinsically watered-down, or at least somewhat simplified, experience in the German language.

I sometimes feel like a poseur when I “do” German. Listening to myself converse with Annik last summer on Schlaflos in München, I felt like I sounded like a complete imbecile who could barely put together a simple sentence in German.

And yet–I wonder whether all non-native speakers of any language always feel that way?