Winter Academy

During my first few days in Mannheim, I will admit that I clung mostly to the other American friends that I had just met. When we started classes in the Winter Academy, I was very excited to meet other students and become closer to those who I had already met. However, I was first very disappointed to realize that my situation was not going to be typical. Most of the other exchange students had either no previous knowledge of German, or were highly advanced in the language. I was caught somewhere in between as an intermediate German speaker. The Winter Academy struggled to place me into a new class, so I ended up joining a class with one other exchange student that had already begun. When I walked into the class I was shocked to realize that the majority of the class was older adults. The other exchange student, Kaitlyn, and I were also the only Americans in the class.
I found this to be very frustrating at first. While all of the other exchange students were growing closer and spending lunch breaks together every day, I felt like I was missing out. They were all doing homework and projects together My class also started 30 minutes before all of the other classes and was on the other side of the school. This meant traveling alone to and from class, and sometimes missing out on exchange student outings. However, once the first weekend passed and I realized there were other times to socialize, my unique class allowed me to see international students in a whole new light. When I had previously thought of international students, I only thought about the students who were my age and also studying at the university.  I soon began to realize that all of the people in my class were international students. They were from countries all over the world, trying to learn German just as I was. The other students were from China, Columbia, Serbia, Argentina, Albania, Iraq, England, and a few others that I cannot remember. They were mostly middle age students here because they have a German spouse, or were here to work and needed to learn the language. I think that because of their age, and more urgent need to learn the language, my class was taken more seriously than others. Most of the other exchange students were hardly studying or every doing German work, while I felt like I had a lot of work. These people pushed me to be prepared for class every day. I felt like it was my responsibility to work harder to be able to contribute in class and help their German even more. I learned a lot from these people. It was very interesting to me that there was such a difference in the German that we knew. Although it was both intermediate, we spoke very different German. My German grammar was much stronger than the others. However, their speaking and listening skills were much better than mine. Since they had been living in Germany longer than me, they felt much more comfortable speaking. They also knew more useful vocabulary words than I did. They could speak about day to day activities like ordering at the butcher or bakery, while I only knew random vocabulary from previous chapters I had learned. This encouraged me to try harder to speak in my daily activities and to become more comfortable with it. They taught me that there is nothing to be embarrassed about when trying to learn the language. Trying to speak German may seem intimidating, but once you get over the initial fear, it becomes very comfortable. This experience in Winter Academy helped me to see exchange students in a new light. Not every student in Mannheim was there on exchange, people from all over the world and all ages were there to learn German and try to eventually immerse themselves in the culture.