PhD, the highest level of education, is not typically focused on language learning, but on something else. The language is the base. The thesis is something new on grammar, literature or whatever. In my case, it was grammar. The language itself is only a means to an end. You need it as the foundation of…
How could I keep this high level I had achieved after having coming back from Spain? Well, the answer is easy: I couldn’t! To hold your level, there are many necessary things: talk regularly to mother tongue speakers continue learning new stuff even though you may think you know “enough” stay inside the culture of…
Why on earth do you still need to attend language courses once you have been in the country for more than a year? Well, I had to. Even though I had just came back from Spain, having been there for the third time for a total of over nine months, I had to go back…
A year earlier I had tried to get a scholarship in California. Somehow I thought it would be fun to study my languages in the United States – an opinion the committee that granted these did not share. They asked a lot of questions about my motivation and also about California. As I hadn’t studied…
I had said about the second semester: „Our teacher came into class the first day and we had a hard time understanding her. She had decided to speed up a tiny bit. Everything was a bit tougher.” Well, this time again: She came in and was even faster. We had to work a lot more…
Valencia is the third biggest city in Spain. I talked to several friends with contacts in Spain and finally a men’s home in Valencia invited me to come over. The house was a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. A lot of men with strange backgrounds, complicated family histories and bad experiences in life waited for me.…
I had totally different plans as a student in high school, but then I chose to study Spanish and German at university to become a teacher. I had found out that my heart was more into languages and cultures and learning about people than any other thing. The first choice I had to make was…
I wanted to join a youth group that was traveling to Spain. As I didn’t know a lot of Spanish I prepared myself by learning phrases by heart. It helped a lot, and I had the impression that I was making progress. But then, something terrible happened: I met a Spaniard in a train. He…
My parents gave me a gift after college: a journey to my country of birth, Chile. Unfortunately, I left Chile when I was four years old and had forgotten all my Spanish. It would have been quite hard and complicated for my parents to organize a Spanish-speaking setting for me to keep the language. It…