Undecided: navigating life and learning after high school

Language Immersion

Language immersion is a terrific way to spend your time off, especially since you will be gaining an extremely marketable skill. Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, and German—are always good to learn, but Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, and languages of emerging markets are going to be in higher and higher demand. And if you can combine a working knowledge of Mandarin or Arabic with some high-tech computer analyst skills, you might have hedge funds (or the CIA) headhunting you.

Any program that sends you abroad, be it for a volunteer, work, or student experience, will also have some kind of language immersion component. But, hands down, the best way to learn a language is to move to the country where it is native, and you must either sink or swim.

Aidan Rooney, lead French teacher at Thayer Academy in Massachusetts, has had years of experience taking young people on trips to France so they can cultivate their language skills. He puts it this way:

“The best language immersion programs are the smaller, well-vetted, individuated ones, such that you are in limited contact with your own people and language and peers, and therefore forced to enter the other. It’s a bit like traveling, and ultimately best done alone. When we are alone, our vulnerabilities are exposed and we can fully embrace a foreign culture and language. So, the best program is no program, living with a family or working with regular folk, making new friends and being forced to communicate in the target tongue. The most successful experiences I’ve orchestrated are one-to-one exchanges between young people: you spend three weeks living with a family in France with someone of similar age, then they do same chez toi. These frequently blossom into family-to-family exchanges, and become, indeed, lifelong relationships. On a personal note, I found myself alone in Paris at sixteen, and having to fend for myself, so to speak—make friends, find work, shop, not go too hungry. It was the best language program, one I continued for several years.”

Rooney is also in favor of enrolling in a local language class, if you can find one where you will live—especially if you are a newbie to the language. His point, and it is a good one, is that you will learn fast if your survival depends on it. Moreover, you’ll learn the local dialect, slang expressions, and shortcuts that a more academic setting can’t teach you. Conversation class happens in real time, at the bakery, or the grocery store, or the train station.

So the best way to learn a new language is to combine travel, work or study, and full-on immersion with native speakers, living side by side with them. But if you can’t do that, there are other ways. You might enroll in a weekly class here at home and enlist your fellow students to meet with you outside of class and speak the language. You can advertise for a native-speaking tutor in your area on Craigslist, and then practice at home online or with foreign language software. Or you can join an online language exchange community and find a tutor or study partner in the native country and learn together via Skype, email, text, or voice chatting.

There are a number of language-focused programs on this side of the Atlantic (and Pacific) where you can immerse yourself for a number of weeks. Middlebury Language Schools (Middlebury.edu) at Middle-bury College and Mills College (Mills.edu) offer full-immersion programs for high school graduates in ten different languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese. As a current high school student, you can also take advantage of a national program called NSLI for Youth (The National Security Language Initiative for Youth; NSLIForYouth.org), which gives scholarships and intensive instruction to young people aged fifteen to eighteen, to help them learn one of seven high-demand languages, either in the summer or for a full academic year. You could also take a language class at your local community college. It’s an easy and affordable way to learn a language and meet like-minded people with whom you can practice.

Don’t Miss This

If language study and Europe sound cool to you, check out eurocentres.com. It’s a language cooperative that will teach you the language of your choice in almost any European city you want to go to, with home-stay options. Or you can look into classes taught abroad by CET (cetacademicprograms.com) in China, Japan, Czech Republic, Italy, Jordan, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Almost every country where you would want to travel has some kind of academic language immersion program, and you can vet them online before applying. Hebrew in Israel? kibbutzprogramcenter.org. Swahili in Zanzibar? glcom.com. German in a summer? Try the International Summer School of German Language and Culture at ifk.uni-hd.de. Your budget, taste for adventure, and lust for a new language are the only restrictions on what you can do.

And don’t forget that we live in the world’s melting pot. There might already be a community of native-speakers in your own city or town that can help you learn the language of your choice. Where I live (a small New England city), there are over thirty languages spoken throughout my community. In larger cities, there are going to be even more. You can also listen to streaming radio from the country you are interested via the internet. And don’t forget your school! There are teachers there who, at the very least, can help you with the romance languages.

Regardless of how you learn your chosen foreign language, make it a goal to get to a country that speaks it at some time in the near future. Your fluency will grow exponentially while you are there, even if you can only afford to spend a couple of weeks. Also, know that if you have developed a working knowledge of another language, it will help you get good internships, work, and volunteer positions abroad, so be sure to check out those opportunities, too.