Intensive Language Immersion Programs
Immersion Program. The Immersion Program is CLI’s core language learning track. With personalized service and attention, CLI delivers focused immersion in an environment designed to maximize language acquisition.
I realised immediately it wouldn’t have hurt to prepare an opening gambit. As my host opened the door and showered me in French, instead of introducing myself I shuffled shyly in with a smile that my rising panic threatened to turn into a grimace.
This was a sobering moment: I’d arrived in Lyon to do a week-long French immersion course for beginners and my first taste of immersion left me floundering. I cobbled together something that bore little resemblance to what would traditionally be recognised as a sentence: more like a kind of Franglais charades (“Ahhhh, oui!” plus “mon avion”, accompanied by pointing at my watch and gesturing backwards to indicate my plane was late). And the most sobering thing was that, despite barely being able to string a sentence together, I wasn’t a beginner in the language at all.
I first started learning French 15 years ago at secondary school, although I now remember more about the effort I channelled into not falling asleep in our after-lunch classes than I do about the actual lessons. Nevertheless, I came out the other side of standard grade French equipped with a firm grasp of the full spectrum of nouns relating to stationary, and some sentences to describe hobbies – mostly ones that I didn’t have. Then, content with reaching this staggering level of conversational ability, I dropped languages altogether.
Dual Language Immersion Programs
It would have surprised me back then to imagine myself 10 years on back in the classroom – and this time voluntarily. On the first morning of my course at the Lyon Bleu international school, I meet my fellow 10 classmates. They have come from Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy and Montenegro, and all for different reasons – some to advance or change their career, others to prepare for a move to France.
My motivation is more personal than practical. I’ve made multiple attempts to rectify my monolingualism since I left school. I took a paper in French while studying history at university: quickly realising how wide the gap was between my stationary-based lexicon and that used by a 19th-century historian to describe the nature of democracy. I’ve tried grammar exercises at home, lunchtime classes at work, sporadically used apps such as Duolingo and Memrise, Michel Thomas CDs in spurts, and stuck (now dog-eared) flashcards around my bedroom.
These frequent but half-hearted attempts put me in the “false beginners” class (which I take as a euphemism for “you’ve learned quite a bit and somehow still can’t really say anything”). We start with the basics – how to introduce yourself, pronunciation, numbers – and I begin to gain hope that this experience is going to be different. First, we are to communicate only in French, even when confused. It feels a tall order, but I soon realise that taking away the crutch of English forces you to be resourceful, often performing communication acrobatics to find references that both you, the teacher and the native Japanese speaker beside you understand.
Second, I recognise how important it is to lose my inhibitions and be open to making mistakes. And it is just as well: the teacher immediately hones in on my incorrect pronunciation, engrained over the years. I look round and see a class of adults staring wide-eyed and childlike at the teacher, slowly echoing the noises she makes and mimicking the comically exaggerated facial expressions that accompany each syllable. It’s humbling, in a really good way.
I start to realise that even though what I’ve learned in the past can’t be summoned on demand, it has left impressions somewhere in my brain, in that same memory-limbo where the words on the tip of your tongue hide.
The time outside of the classroom is just as important to the immersion experience. In the afternoons after classes I make use of the cultural activities provided on the course (wine and olive oil tasting) and – in a less inspired moment – watch Fifty Shades of Grey in French (which, by the way, doesn’t sound more sophisticated in translation).
I spend a lot of time wandering the peach and gold streets of Lyon, reading pretty much anything that has a word on it: street names, shops signs, club posters, metro tickets. I’m happily in a world of my own, indulging in the sounds of French words. It sounds to me like I’m reciting chunks of Voltaire; the reality, of course, is that I’m walking aimlessly around the streets – on my own – saying the equivalent of “meat!”, “face cream!” and “prescriptions!” out loud to myself.
I visit some of Lyon’s many brilliant galleries and museums, picking up vocabulary as I compare exhibition descriptions in English and French. On a few occasions I manage to eavesdrop on parents explaining pictures to their children in a level of French that I can understand.
Even moments of casual sexism, if nothing else, have the benefit of linguistic mystery. When a sleazy guy brushes against me on the street and intimidatingly leers “Mmm c’est super belle”, a grammar question stalls my normal indignation: I have to first figure out just how dirty a look to give him by establishing whether he referred to me in the third person, as an “it”. He didn’t, but still.
Learning a language helps me talk back to the voice of depression
Language Immersion Programs For Adults
My days are book-ended with breakfast and dinner at home with my host. These are initially really challenging, not least because conversations are pretty odd when you can only speak in the present tense. I’m often frustrated by my limited vocabulary (having to describe slippers as “hard socks” was a particular low point), and my sentences are so rudimentary I worry they sound rude. But bit by bit – with the help of huge amounts of patience from my host – these become the highlights of my day. I still have to manoeuvre the discussion towards familiar vocabulary, but we start to have something that resembles a conversation.
As the week draws to an end odd things begin to happen. I start opening my mouth to speak without pre-preparing sentences. One night I have a dream with fragments of French phrases and words. I stop trying to direct-translate everything. And eventually in between words even “ermm” starts to sound jarring, and I replace it with the more French sounding “euuhhh”. By the Friday, it no longer feels like a modern-day miracle that I have spoken another language before I’ve put my “hard socks” on in the morning.
When I fly home on Saturday, I still can’t speak much more eloquently than a French four-year-old, but by then I realise this is totally besides the point. I’ve learned far more each day than I thought I was capable of. It felt hard, but far from a chore. In the end an immersive week-long course gave me more enjoyment than all the other half-hearted attempts over the last 15 years put together.
- The trip was provided by Cactus Worldwide.