The Bonn Language Program

As much as I would have liked to stay longer in Berlin, the start date for the Bonn program was quickly approaching, so I had to pack up and get ready to start classes. I arrived in Bonn the night before check-in and spent the night at a youth center outside of town (kind of weird, really; there was a combination of student groups, teenage kids, and families all staying there). The following day I lugged my stuff to the university to sign in and receive my room assignment.

I knew that we would be assigned university apartments, but I didn’t realize that they would be off-campus. An employee drove us to the housing complex and showed us our rooms, but from then on we had to take either the train or bus to get to campus. I was also disappointed to find out that not all of the students would live in one place; we were spread out between a handful of different housing complexes around the city. Although it wasn’t ideal, I quickly got used to the living arrangements. Even though we couldn’t walk to the university, the train ride only took us 10-15 minutes, and during the busy hours trains came every 10 minutes or so.

Bonn, the former capital of West Germany

The main university building, with the green space where
we often hung out to drink a beer or play football.

The surrounding area is connected to Bonn via an extensive train
network, making it easy to get around.

The day after check in we met at the university to take a placement test. I was nervous at the time, not only because I had no idea what level the other students were, but also since my last German class had been spring quarter of my freshman year (15 months prior). I had been excited to get to Germany during my trip so that I could start using the language again, but quickly realized I was in need of a serious refresher course.

The first few days my attempts at German came out 1/3 correct, 1/3 incorrect, and 1/3 Spanish. It’s odd how your brain gets used to one foreign language and then takes awhile to switch gears. Probably since the same part of the brain is utilized no matter what language one learns. It was like my first instinct was to speak Spanish when I wanted to use German. Fortunately I had several days of practice before my assessment test. A few days might not seem like much, but it definitely helped the transition. Once the gears started to switch it was surprising how quickly I got more comfortable. And luckily for me, the test was only listening and reading comprehension – no speaking involved! That may sound strange, but it just wouldn’t have been feasible to test each of the 150+ kids individually for speaking ability in the short time that we had.

To my amazement, I was placed in the 9^th level (out of a possible 12, 1 being the lowest). I later found out that, at least in my opinion, many of the students in my class were more advanced than I. Well at least concerning grammar and vocabulary. Surprisingly I was one of the better speakers. I wasn’t obviously out of my league though, so I decided to stick with level 9. Instead of worrying about it I told myself it would be a good challenge and in the end help me improve more than if I had switched down a class.

Me with the other Bonn language students; a few were in class
8, but I decided to stay in 9 and in the end it worked out fine.

There were around a dozen students in level 9, and we made for an interesting group. About half the students were from East Asia (two each from Japan, China, and South Korea), several others were Americans, one was from Mexico, and we only had one European. The classes ranged from beginner level (there were multiple level 1 groups) to basically fluent speakers in class 12. Our class was fairly indicative of the group as a whole; the biggest countries represented were China, Japan, and the US, and there were various other nationalities represented from across Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.