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.

(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.