I first came to Switzerland, not for love, unusually — well at least not initially — but instead to learn the local language.

I’d just graduated from university and was deciding what to do next with my life. Foreign languages had always intrigued me, and I knew fluency in a foreign language would enhance my job chances later. But as I’d only ever studied German and French at secondary school, my capabilities were limited to Wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof (what’s the best way to get to the train station) and J’aimerais une limonade (I’d like a lemonade) — not really phrases that were going to get me anywhere on the job market anytime soon.

As luck would have it, my mum had a friend whose daughter lived in the Swiss Alps. She knew a family who ran a restaurant directly on the ski slopes, and they were looking for an au pair girl for their two-year old toddler.

Bingo!

So three months after graduating, I was sat on a plane headed to Geneva to live with a family I’d never met who spoke a language I barely knew. Interesting experience (and more on that in future blog post)…

The problem with coming to Switzerland to learn a foreign language, though, is manyfold. First of all, there are not one but four official Swiss languages depending on which region of Switzerland you’re in — French, German, Italian and Romansch.

I was living in the French-speaking part of the Swiss Alps with my host family, so I was absorbing the language 24/7 pretty much straight away… except for the weekends when their circle of friends would descend from the big cities for a spot of skiing. They were eager to practice speaking English to me, and I was more than happy to oblige because it was great for my social life (but bad news for learning French).

And then I met a Swiss ski teacher — exactly the type of guy my step-dad had warned me not to bring home (and one who also happened to be the Godfather to the little boy I was looking after… like I said, interesting experience! And because we met right at the start of my year as an au pair, English was the only language we had in common, which like with my social life, got our relationship off to a fantastic start.

Fast-forward a couple of years — by which time I’d managed to become fluent in French, despite all odds — and I’d married my Swiss guy (my step-dad did actually end up loving him). As our marital home wasn’t far from the Swiss capital of Bern — a different language region of Switzerland to where I’d spent my time as an au pair — this meant that if I were to have any hope of getting a decent job here, I’d have to start learning the local language again — this time, German.

Which brings me to the second problem with learning a language in Switzerland… the German you learn at language school has nothing to do with the German you hear outside of it. So although you can confidently practice your burgeoning German language skills within the confines of the classroom, this linguistic bubble is rudely burst by the Swiss German dialect spoken out in the real world.

The problem is that Swiss German is a spoken dialect, so there’s no official written version meaning that you can only learn it by listening to it. And grammatically, it’s as different to the original as it is in terms of vocabulary — not to mention that the dialect itself changes from region to region.

You’d think that learning proper German – or ‘high’ German as it’s called here – would help. Not so. Just to make it triply difficult, all Swiss-German speakers understand high German because they learn it at school (and Swiss books, newspapers and TV programmes are mostly in high German), but high German speakers don’t automatically understand Swiss German. Think the Queen’s English versus Glaswegian and you start to get the picture.

So, as you can imagine, this wasn’t an ideal start to married Swiss-German life. Fortunately, we lived in an area where there were foreigners aplenty, and locals were used to speaking high German when asked.

When we moved to live out in the country a few years later, however, this is when the landscape shifted (pun intended). It was the realm of farmers and housewives, and few were eager (or willing, for that matter) to speak anything other than dialect. My passable high German was often met with a blank stare — to the point that having three eyes would’ve probably caused less of a reaction! That’s when I realised that if I was ever going to fit into Swiss country life, I’d need to learn Swiss German. And if I were going to do it quickly and with any measure of success, I was going to have to go cold turkey.

So for the next two years, I deliberately cut off contact with native and non-native English speakers alike. Even my husband had, by this time, stopped speaking English to me. I was getting the full immersion treatment. And it was tough!

Here I was, seven years of living in Switzerland, and I was still feeling as linguistically challenged as the day I’d first landed at Geneva Airport. The only difference was that this time, I was now a stay-at-home mum with a newborn, which probably wasn’t the easiest or wisest of times to be grappling with learning ‘Schwyzerdütsch’. Social media — and Facebook in particular — didn’t exist back then, so I was truly on my own.

Which brings me to the third problem when trying to become fluent in a second language — the sheer frustration of not being able to express who you are. Until you experience having a minimum of linguistic skills, you don’t realise how much of your personality is bound up in your ability to speak.

In hindsight, this was probably the most disheartening and demoralising aspect of my two-year immersion project, and a topic that I’ll go into in more detail in my next blog post…

But I’m comforted by the fact that language learning can help protect an ageing brain, and that I can now visit most parts of Switzerland (plus a couple of European countries to boot) and confidently ask for more than the best way to get to the train station or for a glass of lemonade – not something that we Brits are typically renowned for (nor will we be now that Boris got Brexit done…).

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