Today I had another one of those epiphany moments for this program. It was the first day of our intensive German language courses, and it was also the first day that I had met the 16 or so students that have arrived so far.
I had begun to give this class some consideration before I arrived. Imagine leaning German in English when neither is your native language. That thought had already occurred to me. What I was not prepared for was the amount of languages already spoken by my classmates. There are only 11 of us in my "beginner" German course, but already more than 15 languages are spoken fluently among us. Kurdish, Spanish, Georgian, Russian, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Afrikaans, Swahili, Zulu, Turkish, French, English, Polish, and hopefully German soon. That's just for 11 of us. I can't imagine how much that number will increase when the now 30 of us finally get together.
We passed around a piece of paper and all wrote something about ourselves in each of the languages spoken. More than any other interaction I've had so far, this sent shivers down my spine. It was a tangible object that I could look at and see the amazing diversity of this programme.
Flown by mariposa at 04:17 PM on April 05, 2004
Awesome, Mark.
That's it? Heh heh.... Thanks for taking the time to document your experiences Mark. Don't give up on it... you will treasure these entries in the years to come. I can't wait to hear more of the unfolding of your program, your fellow students (do any of them have weblogs?), and your German.
