Sprachschule: A Summary
I realized that, while I had mentioned language school
previously, I have yet to actually describe what it was like. As my goal with
this blog was to catalogue my experience for my family/friends as well as
potential participants…. Whoops. Let me get on that.
So: throwback to Köln! Arrival was surreal. The first place
we actually went within the city was the Carl Duisberg Centrum, or CDC, which
was our language school. Awaiting us was a small reception where we were
introduced to the staff. We didn’t stay for long—we were very quickly given our
host families’ addresses and descriptions along with 250 Euros for food for the
month, then picked up one by one by taxis or our new host parents.
The next few days were spent adjusting and learning exactly
what we were in for during our stay in Cologne: language classes, a weeks-long
group project, mandatory trips to Bonn, and almost daily excursions.
Language Classes
Now, it’s worthwhile to say that I can only speak on my
experience. Some people had radically different feelings or thoughts about
their time spent at the CDC, so just know that I’m speaking about mine. I was
placed into C1 level class with 3 other PPPler and around 4 other students from
around the world. My class was relatively small—there were other classes that
had up to twenty people in them. I consider myself lucky.
I can’t say that I enjoyed going to language school every
day. I didn’t expect how exhausting it was going to be—that said, I don’t think
any of us did. Pretty much every day, someone was complaining about how tired
they were. We weren’t doing anything physically strenuous on a regular basis,
but learning a language all day, every day is mentally draining. Some days it
felt like, no matter how early I was in bed the previous night, I could not get
enough sleep and yet I had to go back to language school and tire myself yet
again.
That said, class was never particularly difficult. Sure,
there were tricky grammatical constructions and some days my German just did.
not. work. I had an amazing teacher—Tina—who really, genuinely cared about us.
We actually still have a group facebook chat where we all keep in touch. Every
day at the beginning of class, Tina would go around the table and, one by one,
ask us what we did the day previous. Sometimes this took over an hour, but it
didn’t matter. The point was to get us talking in the past tense, and it
worked.
Really, I cannot overemphasize how excellent Tina was.
Because we were a C1 level class, she asked us what we needed to work on/what
we wanted to learn. She always managed to plan lessons that not only focused on
our weaknesses, but also were relevant to our fields of
study/careers/interests. She never gave us busywork, but rather helped us learn
to debate and talk about relevant topics. She also managed to do that while
helping one of the students in my class prepare for a specific language test. I
don’t know how she did it, but I do know that I learned more German in those
two months there than I ever did during a
semester at college, and it was so much fun.
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(Most of) my class :) |
It helped that my classmates were also endlessly
interesting. As I said, there were 3 other PPPler: one from Michigan, one from
Virginia, and one from Alaska. In addition, there were (normally) 4 other
students: an ethnologist from Peru, an architect from Romania, a philosopher
from South Korea, and a jurist from Turkey. We all had radically different
experiences, and it was incredibly interesting to hear from each person every
day. We frequently discussed global politics, our careers, and our drastic
cultural differences. It was never boring.
The Group Project
Because PPP is organized through the German Bundestag, we
were required to take part in one of two projects: we could either study and
present on the upcoming Bundestag election, or we could gather a collection of
perspectives on the cultural differences between Germany and the US. I elected
to take part in the latter.
We were required to meet weekly with our project groups and
a mentor from the CDC. We were allowed to decide what we would like to focus on
as our part of the project, as there were four subgroups within the project
itself: history of the Bundestag, political parties, the current German
perspective, and demographic research. I chose to research political parties,
because that was simply most interesting to me. We did, however, have to make
sure that we were fairly evenly split between language ability so that we could
help each other.
We, along with all the other groups, did lots of internet
research, conducted interviews, and compiled our findings in a blog. The group
researching the current German perspective actually did their interviews
on-camera and compiled them into a video. You can find the results of our work
here.
Trips to Bonn
There were several mandatory trips to Bonn organized for us
so that we could learn more about German history and the government in general.
These were usually interesting, and Bonn is very pretty. It is actually the
former capital of Germany, which is why we were required to go there to learn
about current and former political institutions. My favorite trip was actually
to the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal center for political education), a federal organization dedicated to furthering civic education
throughout Germany. It was amazing—they are focused on simply informing Germans
on how their government works in a nonpartisan way. They also purchase
publishing rights to books important to political movements and moments across
the globe and then translate and publish them in small batches. They then sell
them to the public at very low prices—I bought a German translation of The New Jim Crow for 4.50.
Though I usually enjoyed these trips, they were not always
well organized. For one trip, we were only given two weeks advance notice. This
wouldn’t have been a problem were it not also on the same date as the opening
weekend of Oktoberfest, for which many PPPler had already committed to (and
paid for) plans months ago. There was talk of them possibly getting out of it,
but then it was decided that it was, in fact, absolutely mandatory. Lots of us
(not including me) lost money/the opportunity to go to Oktoberfest, but we
figured it would be worth our time. Unfortunately… it was a very run-of-the-mill trip. We learned things, but it definitely left some people with a very bad taste in their mouth. Oh
well, they ask us to be flexible, right?
Excursions
A benefit to studying at the CDC were the frequent
excursions organized through the staff. These were not mandatory, as they were
open to all CDC students, but they offered trips to popular sightseeing trips
in and around the city, museums, parks, and local organizations. These were a
really good way to get to know lots of other students outside your own class,
and they were always offered at the lowest price they could manage—even when
they required booking a bus.
I definitely enjoyed my time in language school, even if it
was often exhausting. It was really hard to leave—I felt like I had just gotten
close to my class as I was forced to go. Regardless, I’m glad that I had the
chance to get to know them in the first place.
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