Hi! I’m Bryn, and I put together the content on this website to help other families teach their children German wherever they might live.

Here’s a little about me and my motivation for putting this guide together. 

I’m a fluent non-native speaker of German. I started learning German in the fifth grade — it was my worst and least favorite subject all through school. Wanting to finally achieve fluency, I decided to go on my college’s junior year abroad program in Hamburg. Smith College had an amazing program there with innovative wrap-around support, including tutoring and an accent coach. Additionally, I was so interested in everything that I had so much natural intrinsic motivation and suddenly I learned very quickly, moving from an A2 (advanced beginner) level to B2 (upper intermediate) level within a few months. I was very surprised to see that I actually had a natural talent for German after spending over a decade struggling, but hadn’t had the right kinds of support or motivation previously. I went on to spend several years at German universities, completed a PhD in German Literature at Yale University, and taught college and graduate level German classes for five years. 

My academic expertise is in the influence of politics, culture, and media on poetry and poetics from the advent of the printing press through the modern period. As a lover of archives, I have always been fascinated by the promise and problems associated with new technologies, primary sources, and the exchange of ideas. One of my favorite academic projects, was an exhibition I curated for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which was later preserved as a digital exhibition: Creating Germany’s National Myth. The Nibelungenlied and its Homerian Context. The digital project makes it possible for scholars and students to access commented facsimiles of essential texts related to the reception history of the Nibelungenlied — many of which had not previously been available online. In my dissertation, “Collecting Tradition: Modernity, Material Culture, and German Poetry Anthologies, 1765-1795,” I applied book and reception history methodologies to examine the rise of the anthology as we know it in the 18th century and explored its use as a testing ground for innovations in poetics as well as a litmus test for cultural and literary change. As a graduate student, I also organized the Yale Working Group in Book History, a lecture and discussion series supported by the Beinecke Library.

After I completed my PhD, I decided to leave academia and worked in publishing, specializing in translation, a curriculum designer, and finally for ten years as a product manager on products that leveraged AI, computer vision, machine learning, and other prediction modeling techniques. 

When I became a parent, I became interested in all the methods we can use to help our children learn a foreign language, from different parenting approaches (OPOL, inside/outside, etc.) to ways to access media to support our children’s learning journey.