We got together on Friday and baked some Apfelkuchen. It was the first time for all of us, but the results were fantastic.

Summarized in this lovely collage by Olivia (thanks)

Ready to enjoy :)

My what wicked tools ye be usin’

This cake was not a lie! Thanks to the person who provided this recipe:  Apfelkuchen Großmutters Art

We’re looking for people who want to host the next events, any ideas are welcome! Now there’s a groovy calender widget in the sidebar, so we best get to using it.

Cooking is always nice and there will be events in the future, but I think next up is some photowalkin’ and video gamin’. Mario Kart anyone?

Make the most of your Exchange experience

If you’re currently an exchange student (let’s say in Berlin) chances are you’re spending most of your time speaking a language that you already know when you should be enjoying life in another language.
It’s difficult, true. Everybody in the dorm speaks English, you know some people across the hall that speak your mother tongue and that makes life easy. You already have enough stress with classes and managing day to day life, right?

Yes! This is exactly the experience you’re having ;).

This is something you probably already know:

You’re not going to learn much that way.

If you go to Germany and all you speak is English, how do you expect to improve your German? By visiting a language class twice a week? That’s not enough to learn a language and it’s not using the opportunity you have, living in a foreign country.

Most people in Germany speak English which doesn’t make it easy to practice your German, but sometimes you just have to insist on not using English, or Spanish, or French.. whatever your mother language is.
Because it can be kind of rough in the beginning, using Language by Doing to get some practice and getting used to speaking German is a great idea. Visit some events, loosen your tongue, realize the world won’t end if you make the other person wait a bit and find out that nobody will think you’re dumb for not speaking the language fluently. You shouldn’t take yourself too seriously anyway

Get together with some people that are relaxed and who will let you relax. Even better, get together with those people and do something you love doing. If you play Basketball at home, go shoot some hoops with a group of Germans.  If Tekken tournaments are your thing, you can find them.

After the exchange

Now consider the other side of the exchange experience. You’re back home after an exchange, survived the reverse culture shock and got used to being back again.
Chances are you’ll miss living abroad, you’ll miss not understanding everything around you and you’ll miss speaking the language of the country you stayed in.
Personally, I never considered language classes a viable option after an exchange. If I wanted to speak a language, going back to the restrictions of a classroom isn’t really that much fun. Answering a string of pre-decided questions, following a guideline in a conversation or writing essays about topics I really don’t care about is not how I imagine a great time.
So watcha gonna do?
The chances of finding a fixed group of people that speak the language you want to practice, have a website you can find and get together regularly are pretty slim.
Getting together for a language exchange only for the sake of practicing speaking is pretty lame as well. Hanging out in a café, talking about the differences in culture for the twentieth time is about as exciting as doing exercises titled “In der U-Bahn”.

Maybe it’s not such a bad topic after all…

The plan is to provide a network for get-togethers that don’t have to happen on a regular basis. If you spent some time living in Spain and want to speak Spanish back home, there might not be many opportunities for you. So try to get a Salsa teacher to offer one class a week in Spanish and invite others through the site. If you enjoyed barbecues in Brazil, find a Carioca to host it and find people to join on Language by Doing.
Being immersed in an activity will remind you of the good times and you’ll make great experiences.

We are slowly getting to be more people and we’re getting merrier by the day. You can sign up to be a part of this great project in the sidebar or here and spread the word so amazing things can happen!

The first Language by Doing event

It happened March 6th, on a warm Thursday in Berlin-Tiergarten, where, contrary to popular belief, some people do live. A small group of 5 hungry dudes and dudettes gathered to tackle the ultimate culinary challenge: Bratkartoffeln.

Anna- Master of Bratkartoffeln

We had a great time cooking and chatting, ate well and had some drinks sitting at the table late into the night. Tales of foreign lands and nearby museums were exchanged, jokes were made and we tried to make sense of traffic systems around the world (Should there be less or more regulation on the roads? Having less rules works really well in some places )
What did we learn from the first event?

– People in Germany tend to speak English with Americans, even if the Americans would like to practice their German.
– Bratkartoffeln are tasty
– You definitely need laurel leaves, cinnamon and cloves for Rotkohl
– Markus is allergic to peanuts
– Events like this are best to attend if you speak the target language a bit

At least at this event we spent a long time talking, and we did switch to English so everyone could participate, but it’s not really in the spirit of the project.

Chillin all cool and all

So, what to do?

• It’s probably best if you speak the language you want to practice a bit. You don’t need to be fluent, being able to have an easy conversation is good enough. We’re all there to learn, so nobody minds if it takes a bit to get your point across.

• If you don’t speak the target language at all, there are some activities where it probably isn’t that important.
  If there’s a lot of sitting, talking is what you’ll be doing and conversations are a bit easier if you have a basic understanding of the language.
  The host should provide an environment where patience is supported and you can practice, but you need a foundation in the language that can be built upon.

• For activities like sports it’s usually not that important to understand every detail and you’ll  grasp simple expressions and commands quickly. Sports are a great way to learn how to curse as well. Maybe someday we’ll have an “insult the referee” class. Oh, what fun :D.

We had a great time and I’m looking forward to the next event. If you would like to host something, just let me know and I’ll invite the people by e-mail. A better solution is planned for the future, but this is good enough to make it happen!
Spreading the word is also much appreciated! The more people join, the more we can do ;).

I spent a year in Japan during my studies at the university. From 2008 to 2009 I was at Kwansei Gakuin Daigaku in Nishinomiya (between Osaka and Kobe). I had great time there, but Japanese learning was kind of slow at first. All the exchange students would group up, we were put in this unfamiliar atmosphere and so we needed English (or German, or French… whatever people spoke at home) to calm down again.
Going to a foreign country to stay for a while is an interesting experience, but not without difficulties. Some people learned incredibly fast, others not so much. Looking back, the ones that were a bit slower with learning spent a lot of time speaking in their native tongue.

The others found an activity they enjoyed and where they had to speak Japanese. For some it was Kendo, for some the tea ceremony, for me it was going out to bars alone and talking with the people there. The Sake helped talking and  the guests – usually older men had some crazy interesting stories to tell.
I had some great conversations and a lot of fun learning how to speak like an old man or a Samurai. There are expressions in Japanese that are specific for certain groups of the population. Women and men use different vocabulary in quite a few situations. “Hara Heta” (I’m hungry – literally my stomach is empty) isn’t an expression you’d normally hear from a woman, for example.
Other sounds will make you sound like a medieval warrior and usually cause great amusement in Japanese people.

Click on the image for a more detailed Samurai lesson

Apart from the normal curriculum at our university we were each assigned Japanese students, Nihongo Partners, and while they were all very nice, not everyone “clicked” with theirs. Some of them went on to become good friends and the exchange students are still in contact with them. They meet them all around the world. I feel bad about it, but I can’t remember the names of my Nihongo Partners. We would talk once a week, but it was pretty difficult finding topics that both sides were interested in and it stayed on the level of very small talk. Forcing us to speak Japanese for at least an hour or two every week outside of class was definitely a good approach,however. It’s just that it’s way more fun to be forced to speak the language while doing something you’d want to be doing anyway. I always enjoyed a night out with friends so learning some of the vocabulary related to drinking was good fun.

Doesn’t look like it- but this was a really cool bar in Tokyo.

You could heat up canned food if you got the munchies while drinking delicious Japanese beer.

Language learning doesn’t always have to be serious business. Talking in an environment I was familiar with and felt comfortable in (combined with Sake :P) really helped loosen my tongue and that’s still the most important part about practicing languages – speaking.

From Internet to Inter-action
The Internet has changed language-learning for the better, there’s no doubt about it. You can give or receive lessons over Skype to people at the other side of the world. Payments are made via PayPal and the whole process means that nobody even has to leave their bedroom if they don’t want to. All they need is an internet connection. It couldn’t be better, right?
Well, not quite…
In the same way as a Skype conversation will never substitute meeting up with your friends or loved ones in real-time, it’s not quite good enough for learning languages. When you’re learning a language in person, gestures, articulation and even pronunciation become easier. As much as the internet has revolutionized the process, humans are social animals and meeting face to face will always be more effective.
We’re huge advocates of learning-by-doing (what a surprise ;)). Looking around, asking questions about things, generating ideas and conversation is what language learning is all about. I once had a few students over to my place for an informal gathering. One student happened to look through my DVD collection – and learned some words just by seeing familiar titles in a different language. Another asked about the books on my bookshelf. So many conversations generated just by meeting up and discovering similarities!

This should be able to spark a conversation about movies ;)

Love your mistakes
Meeting up outside the classroom brings a lot of the advantages of meeting in a classroom without the limiting factor of textbooks and stilted conversations. You can still focus and are strongly encouraged to speak the foreign language, but meeting up with friends or like-minded people helps get rid of inhibitions and stress. We want to build an environment where you can express yourself and make mistakes. It’s fine, we all make them, all the time. Embarrassing things might happen (and it’s best to laugh about it), but the world won’t end.

“The path to fluency must include a lot of mistakes“  – Benny the Irish polyglot

If you’re working for certain language certificates, this might not seem like the perfect approach, but in the end you will be able to speak more naturally.
Ideally, you’ll enjoy long hours of listening and chatting about topics that interest you, two skills that are crucial for any language learner at any stage. Listening and speaking skills are two components of language learning that cannot be limited to the classroom, because there, learning is forced. And often the thought of having to be perfect and make no mistakes among those four walls becomes a block to the learner, and this halts the  development of the language. Be with people you like, while doing something you love, however, and stress won’t be an issue because you’ll just enjoy the company and have fun.

Keep it together
In a classroom, language learning becomes unnatural in the sense that language is deconstructed and taught in pieces, not as a whole like when among friends. It’s a little like building a house with blocks and cement. Two different items, but both crucial to get the job done.
Similarly, the classroom provides instructed lessons; they are separate blocks that are often taught by separate teachers. I’ve often had students ask me when to use the Past Perfect Tense. If the students had learned from speaking and listening to their friends when to use the Past Perfect Tense, the chances that they would have understood the reason of using it would be higher. It would be higher because they have context. No native English speaker consciously decides what tense has to be used, it comes naturally. The classroom does not provide context, it provides structured, often doctored lessons with conversations that sound very unnatural at times. Basically, language cannot be simply learned in a classroom, it has to be experienced.
Think of the best speaker of any foreign language that you know and then ask them how they learned the language. I’ll bet you any money they won’t tell you that they learned the most through textbooks. Get out there. Meet people. It’s the natural way that any of us can learn a foreign language.

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