Purgatory -- or Passport?
Foreign language class: the wave of your future.
The Classroom
The thought of language lessons usually invokes visions of tedious vocab cards, verb tense memorization, and text book translations that take forever to finish -- all set in a sterile classroom environment. What’s hard to envision in a third-period French class is the vista of a beach on the West Coast of France at the height of summer, when the waves are pumping and you're looking at a beach full of babes -- none of whom parlaient anglais.
Get lost ... on a European subway.
Sitting there with a Spanish pop quiz in hand and an infinite hour in which to finish it, no teacher ever explained to me that the verb tenses are really a passport to adventures. Why did they never discuss the fun to be had flirting on plazas in Madrid, getting a text about a party in Tokyo, interviewing for a summer internship in Amsterdam, or applying for a homestay with a family in Senegal?
Some people are lucky enough to grow up in a household where more than one language is spoken (sorry. Pig Latin does not count), but for the rest of us, slogging through the subjunctive is our only route there.
OK, Go
It’s not just high school students who are plowing through the pronouns. Trendy families are sending babies, toddlers and elementary school kids through the language ropes. Not because they’re trying to bore their kids into naptime, but because they're trying to make them smarter, more sophisticated residents of the world who get what’s going on.
If parents aren't doing the pushing on the language lessons and need some extra convincing, remind them that brushing up the skills can open up more job options. If you wanted to intern at MTV Italy one summer, for example, there’s only one language spoken there -- and it’s not English. An increasingly globalized economy means increasingly globalized jobs, where even entry-level gigs could mean trips to oil rigs in the Middle East, movie shoots in Bulgaria, or reporting on skate competitions in Spain.
In my high school, Spanish class was always a chore until I got accepted into my school’s foreign exchange program sophomore year. Suddenly it wasn’t about verbs and vocab, it was an entry to parties, dancing, shopping and making friends in a place where I knew no one. Later on, I started saving summer cash for plane tickets to wherever I’d seen photos of mountains and waves that I had to visit. Soon, the memories of pop quizzes and vocab flashcards were replaced with those of deep barrels in Fiji and powder days in the Alps.
Drink up some culture.
Snow Patrol
Once the pop quizzes were way behind me and the fun had begun, one of the best on-site language courses I had was accidental; it started around 4 p.m. one winter afternoon when the sun was going down behind the Swiss Alps. The light had gone grey across the tiny ski village I was in, and the streets were teeming with people clomping around in boots and loaded up with gear on their shoulders.
My friend Steph and I sat watching it all go by from a booth inside a little café, where we were sipping hot chocolate after a day on the slopes. We were teaching snowboarding at a winter camp that year, and had taken a rare day off to kick it without classes.
As the day slowly faded into evening and we were getting sick on our third cups of hot cocoa, a couple of the local instructors rolled in to the café. We’d seen these guys teaching lessons near ours, and had shared lifts with them on the bunny slopes a couple of times. One of them had blue eyes that you could see even through his goggles, and I’d been dying to talk to him for weeks.
They came over and slid in next to us, and my heart was pounding. This was the stuff that my European ski dreams were made of. But when intros were over and I asked my beautiful crush how long he'd been instructing, the table went silent. He and his pal squirmed in the booth a little: They didn't sprechen the English, and we had zero going on in German.
Cute is What We Aimed For
This was the start of a kind of awkward exchange in which we learned more German vocab for snowboarding tricks than we knew in our native tongues. Not every class is this fun, but when we eventually returned to our language courses in school, it was easier to trudge through verb tenses when we could remember what those translate into in the glare of icy blue eyes, over hot chocolate.
Still want a break from your homework? Check out
2006 movies to study with, and the rest of what's hot on Back to School.
The thought of language lessons usually invokes visions of tedious vocab cards, verb tense memorization, and text book translations that take forever to finish -- all set in a sterile classroom environment. What’s hard to envision in a third-period French class is the vista of a beach on the West Coast of France at the height of summer, when the waves are pumping and you're looking at a beach full of babes -- none of whom parlaient anglais.
Sitting there with a Spanish pop quiz in hand and an infinite hour in which to finish it, no teacher ever explained to me that the verb tenses are really a passport to adventures. Why did they never discuss the fun to be had flirting on plazas in Madrid, getting a text about a party in Tokyo, interviewing for a summer internship in Amsterdam, or applying for a homestay with a family in Senegal?
Some people are lucky enough to grow up in a household where more than one language is spoken (sorry. Pig Latin does not count), but for the rest of us, slogging through the subjunctive is our only route there.
OK, Go
It’s not just high school students who are plowing through the pronouns. Trendy families are sending babies, toddlers and elementary school kids through the language ropes. Not because they’re trying to bore their kids into naptime, but because they're trying to make them smarter, more sophisticated residents of the world who get what’s going on.
If parents aren't doing the pushing on the language lessons and need some extra convincing, remind them that brushing up the skills can open up more job options. If you wanted to intern at MTV Italy one summer, for example, there’s only one language spoken there -- and it’s not English. An increasingly globalized economy means increasingly globalized jobs, where even entry-level gigs could mean trips to oil rigs in the Middle East, movie shoots in Bulgaria, or reporting on skate competitions in Spain.
In my high school, Spanish class was always a chore until I got accepted into my school’s foreign exchange program sophomore year. Suddenly it wasn’t about verbs and vocab, it was an entry to parties, dancing, shopping and making friends in a place where I knew no one. Later on, I started saving summer cash for plane tickets to wherever I’d seen photos of mountains and waves that I had to visit. Soon, the memories of pop quizzes and vocab flashcards were replaced with those of deep barrels in Fiji and powder days in the Alps.
Drink up some culture.
Snow Patrol
Once the pop quizzes were way behind me and the fun had begun, one of the best on-site language courses I had was accidental; it started around 4 p.m. one winter afternoon when the sun was going down behind the Swiss Alps. The light had gone grey across the tiny ski village I was in, and the streets were teeming with people clomping around in boots and loaded up with gear on their shoulders.
My friend Steph and I sat watching it all go by from a booth inside a little café, where we were sipping hot chocolate after a day on the slopes. We were teaching snowboarding at a winter camp that year, and had taken a rare day off to kick it without classes.
As the day slowly faded into evening and we were getting sick on our third cups of hot cocoa, a couple of the local instructors rolled in to the café. We’d seen these guys teaching lessons near ours, and had shared lifts with them on the bunny slopes a couple of times. One of them had blue eyes that you could see even through his goggles, and I’d been dying to talk to him for weeks.
They came over and slid in next to us, and my heart was pounding. This was the stuff that my European ski dreams were made of. But when intros were over and I asked my beautiful crush how long he'd been instructing, the table went silent. He and his pal squirmed in the booth a little: They didn't sprechen the English, and we had zero going on in German.
Cute is What We Aimed For
This was the start of a kind of awkward exchange in which we learned more German vocab for snowboarding tricks than we knew in our native tongues. Not every class is this fun, but when we eventually returned to our language courses in school, it was easier to trudge through verb tenses when we could remember what those translate into in the glare of icy blue eyes, over hot chocolate.
2006 movies to study with, and the rest of what's hot on Back to School.
Game
Go ahead. Go berzerk.
Celebs
Fame, cash, love. (Yawn.)
Surfing
Could you win the dream?
Ringtones
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