I went to the Leeds Met/University of Leeds 'Languages Festival' for Mardi Gras yesterday with some of the languages students from college. Most of them were French students, though Antonia from my Spanish class and Cory/Corey (no idea how he spells it) from the other AS Spanish class went too. Everyone kind of mingled in together all day, though, especially when we were left to our own devices and had to find lunch then find our way back to the room we were in all day.
The day was always going to be a tad weird, the teachers going with us were Tosh - the German teacher - and Steph - a French teacher. Before we'd even left Tosh potentially could have ended up getting run over by our minibus... We arrived waaaay too early so we hung about outside the conference room for a bit beforehand. We had a talk from thebigword, a global translation company based in Leeds. I was particularly happy to find out that they had an office in Stockholm, not because it's useful information at all but because I like Sweden. What a sad thing for me to say...
We then broke off into our chosen language groups to do some speaking practice. I was paired with a girl called Lucy, an A2 student. Our tutor, Elisa, looked scarily like my cousin Amy and was possibly the happiest Spanish tutor I've ever come across, she was lovely though. Even though we didn't speak for long and it was all on 'la ley antitabaco', I actually got something out of the fact that I was working with an A2 student - her speed when talking showed me in a very practical way that I need to improve on my own pace for the oral exam, and I found myself consciously trying in my speaking session with Ester today (it didn't have much of an effect, but I was trying which is a start).
In the afternoon we got to do two 'less common' language taster sessions. My group did Italian first, which confused me because it's not uncommon in comparison to the other languages we could have done/did do. The teacher was a little strange and didn't really teach us any Italian, although I do now know what 'spaghetti' means, always useful...
Our second taster session was Japanese with an adorable little Japanese woman (that honestly was never intended to sound quite so patronising...) - we learnt the basics (ohayou, konnichiwa, konbanwa, arigato, Rachel desu etc etc) and some basic numbers, as well as ''biiru o ippon kudasai'' and something about ice cream. We then learnt that karate literally means 'empty hand' (kara - empty, te - hand) as in not holding any weapons, using your body to fight etc, that karaoke means 'empty orchestra' (kara - empty, oke - orchestra) as in without music and about the Shinkansen. We had a little introduction to how Japanese writing characters are formed, it was actually really interesting. For instance, 'eye' in Japanese is '目' - if you rotate that symbol it looks like a square eye, as it originates from the visual for 'eye'. I found the bit about characters fascinating.
All in all, it was a good day out. I'd have preferred to choose our own languages, as I wanted to do Russian as I do actually have an interest in it, but never mind. I'd have never chosen Japanese and it was fascinating, so I'm glad we didn't get a choice in that respect. I seem to have taken away a feeling that languages aren't as hard as I seem to believe they are, which is nice because I feel a little more encouraged to stick at my Spanish and do it at university now.
Besos ♥
Rachel
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