Language school

By PR // 20 January 2010 // Comments: 0 // Related Categories: sydney, Traveller blog

Language school

I came to Sydney to study English in an international language school and I feel like I learned a lot, not that much English though. The first day all the new students did an English test and we were placed on different levels according to the test results. The groups were truly international - in my group alone we had people from France, Holland, Sweden, Brazil, Denmark, Italy, Finland, Germany, Switzerland...

The lessons were fairly easy going because I only studied general English. Our teacher was a proud Canadian who, when asked about her accent, pointed out that the Canadian accent is VERY different from the American accent.The lessons consisted of group discussions, grammar and so on. When I heard the word “grammar” it was like a sign to my brain to switch to sleeping mode. Thankfully our teacher was easily distracted when she was teaching grammar - usually we interrupted her by starting to talk about something entirely different.

The best thing about our lessons was the endless discussions we had about everything and nothing. Sometimes the discussions were deep, sometimes just plain stupid. On break time our favourite activities included drinking too much coffee and complaining about the school. On Thursdays at least half of the class didn’t show up at all - most Wednesdays we got free drinks at a bar close to the school...

I don’t know if my English is any better than when I came here (lets hope so!) but at least I’ve learned a lot about the world. A funny thing that I noticed is that now I can recognize many different accents - when I meet other travellers in Sydney I can usually tell where they come from by listening to how they speak English.