I remember when I first traveled to Germany. I was 20 years old and the flight from Lima to Munich was very long. I stopped in Paris, and after losing 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 the truth is that I barely understood what she had said. I had already taken several German courses in my country, in various schools, and yet I could not understand what that lady was talking about. At that time, he was going to do a German course at the Goethe Institute located in the city of Prien on the shores of Lake Chiemsee, near Munich. After an hour’s flight, I reached my destination and went 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 used means of transport. Almost all towns and cities have a train station.
The German course lasted four weeks and was semi-intensive since we had classes of four hours a day, from Monday to Friday. In the course the students were from different countries. There were from Mexico, the United States, 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 by using the German language. Apart from that, when we finished classes and went out into town, we also had to communicate in German. If we were going to buy it was very good to listen to the salesman who spoke to us in German. When we walked down the street, we read the store signs and street names that were written in German. All of this meant that we had an immersion in the language we were learning. Furthermore, when we returned to our accommodation, which was in the houses of German families, we communicated in German.
From time to time you would meet a classmate who was going to school and we would practice the language on the way. The town of Prien is small and you can get to everything 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 acquired and preserved knowledge.
At the end of the course we took an evaluation exam and obtained a certificate. The age range of the students was 18 to 60 years old. Some 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 the Internet and online language teaching did not exist yet. Nowadays, with new technologies, language teaching has changed because virtual and online courses are widely used, which are also very effective for learning a language.