WEBVTT

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I was born in Germany and grew up in the Ruhr area, in Oberhausen. My family language at home was always Greek, right from the start. 

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My parents (...) My father taught himself a bit of German and he's actually become quite good at it, but even so, the family language at home was always Greek and I started learning German only in kindergarten. 

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And this worked very well, even though there were some expressions and words that I only knew in Greek, such as certain vegetables that my mum only ever mentioned at home, and hence I didn't know theie German names. 

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For example garlic: I just didn't know the word in German. I only learned it in the sixth grade, I think. 

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In addition, I had heritage langauge classes in Greek right away from the first grade on. In fact, this was quite well organised in our school. 

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I had the classes as part of the morning lessons, approximately one hour per day, in free periods, and I also learned to write, and to speak 

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So I learned to speak 'properly', and at the same time, I always spoke German at home with my brother. I still do, time and again. 

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Even if my parents always said: "No, no, we speak Greek here, you already speak German with all your friends. 

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We didn't find that very nice, but they were right [laughs], and we spoke German with all our friends. But we actually managed to keep Greek up very well. And I continued Greek classes until my Abitur [school leaving exam]. 

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I was lucky because we were always a very small Greek class of 3 or 4 people. I even had lessons on my own for a while and had wonderful discussions with the teacher in the upper secondary classes. 

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I learned a bit about philosophy or Ancient Greek, and I really liked that. That was great. (...)

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I learned to read and write in Greek very well and I kept learning even after my school leaving exam. At that time, we didn't have an official document to prove that we had officially studied Greek.

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But if you had passed the German Abitur [school leaving exam], you could also qualify for the Greek equivalent [the Abitur in Greece]. I did that with my brother when we were in our early 20s. 

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This decision was exceptional, as no one else was interested- But we still wanted to have a language certificate and we still remember: heritage language speakers were not taken so seriously in that they could also write well. 

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and when we had to write an essay, I still recall the teachers supervising and leaning over us, saying: "but they can write." [laughs] That was very funny. 
Yes, so definitely German and Greek.

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German is still of course // I studied in Germany, I also studied language and German is my scientific language.

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I think my vocabulary is naturally larger there. But then you can always acquire new words. Yes.