I remember when I first traveled to Germany. I was 20 years old and the flight from Lima to Munich was very long. I made a stopover in Paris, and after missing the connection that would take me to my destination, I had to board the next plane. I remember sitting next to a German lady to whom I said a few words in German, and when she answered me the truth is that I hardly understood what she had said to me. I had already taken several German courses in my country, in various schools, and yet I couldn’t understand what that lady was talking about. At that time I was going to take a German course at the Goethe Institute located in the town of Prien on the shores of Lake Chiemsee, near Munich. After an hour’s flight, I reached my destination and headed to the house of a German friend who lived in Munich. This friend had given me some German classes in Lima.
A couple of days later I went to Prien where the Goethe Institute school was. The trip was made by train. In Germany, the train is the most widely used means of transport. Almost every town and city has a train station.
The German course lasted four weeks and was semi-intensive since we had classes for four hours a day, from Monday to Friday. In the course the students were from different countries. There were from Mexico, USA, Italy, Switzerland, France, Norway, Vietnam, Japan and other countries. Classes were taught in the morning by a German teacher, who taught us grammar, pronunciation, and writing and listening skills. The good thing about the students was that since they all spoke different languages, the only way to communicate was using the German language. Other than that, when we finished school and went out into the city, we also had to communicate in German. If we were going to buy it was very good to listen to the seller who spoke to us in German. When we walked down the street we read the signs of the shops and the names of the streets that were written in German. All this meant that we had an immersion in the language we were learning. In addition, when we returned to our accommodation, which was in the houses of German families, we communicated in German.
From time to time one would meet a classmate going to school and we would practice the language on the way. The town of Prien is small and everything can be reached on foot. The extraordinary thing about all this is that one remembers images of everything that could have been experienced in those four weeks of the course. But in addition to the images, the sound of the German words heard is also remembered. Not all naturally, but many of those German words have been etched in the memory and are knowledge acquired, preserved.
At the end of the course we took an evaluation exam and obtained a certificate. The age range of the students was from 18 to 60 years. Some of them had taken the course because they needed it for their work, others, as in my case, to study later in Germany, and the rest because they wanted to learn another language.
Finally, I would like to mention that I did this course when there was no Internet and online language teaching yet. Today, with new technologies, language teaching has changed because virtual and online courses are widely used, which are also very effective in learning a language.