This week, we’ve teamed up with Lizzie Fane from thirdyearabroad.com to bring you some ideas for cool foreign language immersion courses you can take whilst travelling in Europe. Lizzie writes:

 

“Spending time abroad may be a great way to hone language skills, but when you find yourself surrounded by tourists, constantly replying in English, it can really hold you back. Language courses or conversation partners for café chats can help, but you still often find you’re speaking English half the time.

The absolute best, tried and tested contingency plan – whether you’re there for a week, month or year – is to sign up to do a course or activity along with the locals. You get to learn a new skill, whether it’s sushi-making, oil painting or surfing, but you’ll also pick up new words and phrases to describe what you’re doing. Think about it – if you’ve never come across a particular fabric before or don’t know the name of a kitchen utensil, you naturally fill the gap in your vocabulary with the foreign word. Fluency and craftsman-status in one!

I say ‘tried and tested’ because I spent my uni third year out in Florence trying absolutely every new thing I could find! There are a LOT of tourists there, so this was my cunning plan to avoid them and attempt to blend in… I did a weekly Florentine Calligraphy course and I learnt the art of Tuscan cooking at La Pentola delle Meraviglie (‘the saucepan of marvels’) which offered an 8-11pm class, covering supper nicely once a week for ten weeks.

I was the only non-Italian student in these classes, so everyone looked after me and made sure I understood what was going on.

If I had any language-related questions on my courses that I didn’t want to bore my classmates with, I jotted them down and went to see the linguistical geniuses at the British Institute (who incidentally offer brilliant classical life- and cast-drawing classes in English at Charles Cecil Studios twice a week). They explained colloquialisms to me and how to understand the Florentine dialect.

Once you’ve signed up, you have something productive and different to do in your evenings, you make some great local friends with similar interests to you and you learn to speak the language fluently – what more could you want from a course?“

Lizzie is the owner and founder of thirdyearabroad.com, a site devoted to giving language students the best information, news and ideas for making the most of their third year studying abroad.