University of Leicester: Modern Foreign Languages Summer School

On Monday the 29th and Tuesday the 30th, I went to a language summer school at the wonderful University of Leicester.

On the Monday we had an introduction to MFL, it consisted of an hour long lecture (not the bad kind) led by Jean Baxter explaining the importance of having a second language and all of the opportunities it opens up.

This was followed up by a brilliant session of Mandarin (a common language spoken in China) where I learnt to say who I am and the names of my parents. All Mandarin is written in neat symbols adapted from old Chinese.

Across the rest of the day I learnt some German in an air-conditioned lecture theatre. However instead of learning the basics like hello and goodbye, we were thrust into the realms of directions (saying how to get to places) and the genders of words, of which there are 3 (female, male and neutral).

We then had a surprisingly good disco which comprised of 30 second previews of songs downloaded from I-tunes. There was plenty of people to talk to, and more importantly lots of space to relax. We were privileged to be staying in a wonderful hall of residence (Stamford house I believe) that had lush gardens, nice rooms and brilliant catering (high on my agenda).

The Tuesday saw us learn either Spanish or Russian, I chose Russian. I tell you now, the Russian language is sooooo different to that of English/German/French/Spanish there is an amazing 33 letters of the alphabet.

Each of the above makes a different noise (yes Russian is based around phonics). This means that you need to learn all of the letters noises to be able to read the language. One thing that makes the Russian language easier than others is the fact that instead of having to say;

I am called Redeagle you can just say called Redeagle.

This means that one sentence could be used for more than one thing although it could get annoyingly confusing. The course was very enjoyable and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys languages.

By Redeagle