Linguastars

First off, I'm really not well at the moment so I apologise in advance for the lack of sense in this post.

Soooo, Linguastars. What an insane two days. We arrived at something like 9:45 on Tuesday 12th and had an icebreaker session to get to know the group. Our first impressions of everybody else? Well, we all had to make animal noises at people and 'find someone of the same species'. I was a chicken...I can't make chicken noises. Awkward. We then got given a bunch of balloons and straws and had to try and make the tallest tower out of what we had. Ours was, well, rubbish... The majority of our building time looked like this >>>


After balloon building we separated into language groups and the Spanish group went and sat in a computer room for about half an hour attempting to figure out what we were doing as our 'stand in teacher' didn't speak Spanish. We ended up doing some research on Universidad de Córdoba, which is apparently somewhere near Malaga. I'll warn you now, just for future reference, there is no information at all about catering at the university anywhere online. Guess what my research topic was... 


After that, we went to an AMAZING Linguistics taster session with a cool Bulgarian woman. We talked a bit about grammar and sentence structuring in English, and then we did some Vietnamese grammar. I seriously shouldn't have enjoyed learning Vietnamese grammar quite as much as I did, but it was SO cool. Chim nyo ku'ng thay chim to - the little bird also perceives the big bird. And then we talked about Latin alphabets vs. Cyrillic alphabets and Chinese alphabets. 


After lunch we had a terrible World Cinema taster session with a guy who just read out a research essay for an hour about western films. It was basically media theory but he got several bits wrong. From there, we went to our second Spanish session where the teacher, María, had us ringing her friend in Spain and asking him questions in Spanish. She started the lesson by talking about how she wanted to break down the fear barrier that language students have so she decided the best way to do that would be to make us ring her friend. As you do. It was a really odd experience but lots of people said afterwards that it did give them confidence, and it definitely did for me. 

In the evening, we did 'University Challenge' in random teams. The best round was the playdoh/pictionary round where we'd be given random things to model and the rest of the team had to guess. I think my most random object was 'piano'. We also had to make a team mascot out of sweets... meet Nemo. 


Wednesday began with presentation preparation in Spanish. We decided ours was going to be 'Cita a Ciegas' (Blind Date) where a uni student had three potential flatmates to choose from a lineup. After Spanish we had Russian (:D) where we learnt some of the Russian alphabet and were taught some basic words and phrases. The aim of the lesson was to demonstrate that learning a foreign alphabet, like that of Russian, doesn't have to be 'scary' or 'too hard'. By the end of the session, I was able to remember a fair amount of the letters.


We then had a UCAS workshop which was, well, dull, and then another Spanish session to finalise our presentation preparation and rehearse. My group ended the day with Interpreting, which was also quite a cool experience. We had to take it in turns to try out the different types of interpreting (English to English) including going into the booths and using the headsets or having to remember the entire speech and recite as much of it as possible. 


The day ended with presentations and certificate-giving. Our presentation definitely got the best audience reaction...if only because Adam (one of the student helpers) was interpreting for everybody and couldn't speak any Spanish. I was the contestant that ''hated everything and only liked animals and fish''. It's interesting having to shout ''odio el helado'' and throw a fake ice cream across a room in front of complete strangers when you're losing your voice (if anybody reading heard me today, you may now understand why I could barely speak...) The two other girls in the picture are Carolina (in blue) - the shy one, and Becky - the insane one. Becky was one of my actual flatmates for the night we spent in Charles Morris halls and Carolina, I believe, was part Portuguese/had been brought up speaking Portuguese. 


Overall, the two days were absolutely exhausting, but amazing at the same time. It was SO, so good to be around people with a passion an obsession for languages. There was one random guy who sat with us for lunch on Wednesday who asked if he could look at my apple juice bottle because it had Norwegian on the label. Yes! That is absolutely the sort of random thing I would do too. 


Today was the second Induction Day at college and I was in English Language then on the Amnesty stand at the Enrichment Fair. More on that when I'm less ill.


Besos ♥ 
Rachel