When I got into tenth grade, we did not have five separate classes anymore. Instead, we were introduced to a course system where we had some freedom to choose certain subjects (that is quite common in Germany). Anyway, our teachers arranged for us to stay in a youth hostel for a week, so that we could get to know each other better. Everyone had the opportunity to decide on a cultural program they would like to engage in for that time, and I decided on a poetry slam workshop.

 

At that time, I really enjoyed being creative, so poetry slam was the obvious choice for me, and I could enjoy myself a lot during the workshop. Eventually, we organized a poetry slam contest, so everybody else could see what we did all the time, and I won that contest with a humorous text I had written. Because of that I was granted the chance to compete with other poetry slam enthusiasts from my region during a regional championship in Paderborn. Unfortunately, I finished penultimate, but it was still a great experience for me, although I noticed that poetry slam is not really my cup of tea.

 

In school, I had another two occasions during which I were able to present texts of mine. After finishing school, however, I never wrote another text for poetry slam. When I was engaged in poetry slam, I made the experiences that humorous texts are usually more successful than serious, though-provoking texts which bothered me a bit.

 

When I was in school, I always enjoyed music as a subject, although I could contribute very little because my understanding of music theory is quite limited. It did not have a big influence on my grades, though, because I participated in class whenever I could.

 

Anyway, I enjoyed to become acquainted with different types of music, and I always admired people who are able to play one or more instrument(s). A few months ago, I bought a recorder because it is one of the easiest instruments to learn and I always liked flutes. Happily, a good friend of mine is very skilled and knows how to play a couple of instruments (including the recorder), so she helped me a lot. For example, she taught me how to play a bit of Vivaldi's Spring, but I did not really practice a lot, and so my recorder has been in a cupboard for months.

 

When I was eighteen, a classmate introduced me to “Death Note”, and I immediately fell in love with that series. I bought and read all volumes of the manga series and watched the complete anime in a couple of days. Sure, I had my childhood anime like Pokemon, Detective Conan, and Digimon, but I did not know that the world of anime and manga was that large and diverse. To this day, I watched a few dozen anime series and read around five hundred manga. But my interest did not stop there.

 

Watching anime and reading manga, I became acquainted with a lot of aspects of Japanese popular culture and did some research on them. I even tried to learn some basic Japanese, but the writing system is excruciatingly hard. There is plenty of material in German and English, though. For example, I read a lot of novels by Haruki Murakami, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short stories, and Soseki Natsume's famous novels Kokoro and I am a cat, listen to Japanese music and read articles on Japan (SoraNews24 is great for that).

 

Moreover, I became interested in buddhism, South Korean music, and stories of North Korean refugees. There are also a couple of books by Chinese and Korean authors which I read. Reading is a great tool to explore other countries and their culture.

 

From childhood on, I enjoyed foreign language classes and exposed myself to as many languages during my school days as I could. Successively, I studied English (10 years), French (4 years), Latin (5 years), and Russian (3 years). At university, I improved my Russian skills and took courses until C1 level. Furthermore, I studied Ukrainian until B1 level.

 

From February to July 2018, I spent a semester abroad in Latvia and studied – amongst others – the Latvian language which became my fifth modern foreign language. Moreover, there are more languages which I could study at university, and I would definitely like to become acquainted with more foreign languages. Furthermore, I have always been fascinated by and interested in Japanese, so I definitely want to study some Japanese one day, too.

 

I really think that there are many advantages in knowing many foreign languages. First and foremost, it makes it so much easier to socialize with people from different countries and cultural backgrounds. Certainly, there are always people who argue that it is sufficient to know English as everyone is supposed to speak English nowadays, but I strongly believe that knowing someone else‘s native language makes it much easier to socialize with them and understand their culture as it would be by means of the English language.

 

Due to the fact that my parents always adored Scandinavia, I have been to Denmark and Sweden very often when I was a child. During one of our holidays, which we spent somewhere in the west of Sweden, we also day-tripped to Oslo, Norway, but unfortunately, I hardly have any recollections of these holidays. The last time I have been to Sweden was in 2011. In my childhood, I did not really enjoy going there because it always seemed so boring and awfully calm to me. Today, however, I understand why my parents liked the silence and ease of Scandinavian villages, and I enjoy it, too. Thus, I really want to visit Scandinavia again one day.

 

Being a language enthusiast, expressing the desire to live abroad for a while is probably not that uncommon. However, such a decision still requires some courage and love of adventure. When I visited Ukraine in September 2017, I got to know a lector of the DAAD, and I quite like the idea of working abroad for two to five years.

 

One of my goals in life is to have a command of both English and Russian that is on a par with that of a native speaker. Besides, I studied some Ukrainian, so maybe spending some time in Ukraine would not be a bad choice, would it?

 

Being someone who likes to work with his mind rather than his hands, I would love to write and publish a book one day which is one of my persistent goals in life. I always enjoyed writing and already made first experiences as a journalist.

 

There are several reasons why I want to become a published author. Certainly, there is some sort of intellectual immortality to becoming an author, and I would lie if I said that this does not appeal to me. Moreover, I would like to both entertain and educate people with my writing which is why I could imagine to compose a nonfiction book or textbook one day. Money is not really important to me in that matter because I cannot picture myself making a living from writing anyway. However, I would not mind to become a teacher who works on educational books in his spare time.