In this post, I want to talk about my goals for linguistic tourism and my first experience with trying to go on such a trip.
I came up with the idea for linguistic tourism many years ago while I was on a trip in Europe. My then-boyfriend-now-husband and I were on a trip going through Germany, Czech Republic, and a little bit of Austria. Prior to the trip, I had been learning some German on my own (listened to basic course of the Michel Thomas program), and I also tried to do a bit of Czech, but that turned out to be too much of a challenge for me at the time. I felt pretty good about the amount of German that I had learned, and I was hoping to be able to actually use it while I was there. But as soon as I got there, I felt a real lack of confidence in my ability to actually use the language — even basic interactions like ordering a coffee would trip me up. And so at some point I more-or-less gave up trying.
Cut to the last leg of the trip. We were in a small town at the Germany-Austria border called Salzburg, and we were in the Mozart museum/house. By this point, I was feeling like we were traveling too frequently for me to really get comfortable with wherever we were at, and I couldn’t really get a sense of the local culture and language use. So while walking through Mozart’s Birthplace, reading about his life oh so many years ago, I came up with the idea of finding a school to learn the language of the place I wanted to visit, staying there for a few weeks, then my partner could join me to do more touristy kind of things (he also likes to see and do a lot on each day of a trip, and so giving myself some time to get to know the area and the culture could ease some of tension that I felt moving so quickly from place to place).1
However, life got in the way and I couldn’t really give this idea a try until this summer, after I finished my PhD at UNM. (I also knew that I probably wouldn’t have another chance like this for a while, so this was a graduation present to myself to really take advantage of the rare time between positions.) I started planning where I wanted to go, and I was also thinking about the eclipse that had passed through the States a few years back, and I had some fomo about it, so I decided I’d go somewhere where I could also get to see the eclipse. Since there was going to be one the summer after I graduated, and the path of totality was going through the western part of Iceland, I thought it would be the perfect time to try to make this linguistic tourism thing happen.
I got started doing some research and found a summer intensive program in the West Fjords that would end the week before the eclipse, so that I could go to the school for two weeks, then spend the remaining week in the Reykjavík area doing some actual tourism and get to see the eclipse. And also I could put the Icelandic that I had learned into practice as well, since I’d have more opportunities to speak and build up my confidence while in a class in a way that I hadn’t been able to before the trip to Germany. I made plans to go on this trip with my best friend Kirby, who also had some interest in learning Icelandic, seeing the country and the eclipse, and also trying out this linguistic tourism idea.
After signing up for the summer course, they asked us to complete the “survival level” online Icelandic course, and as the date got closer, I managed to get most of it done. I wasn’t too satisfied with just that course, since it didn’t provide a lot of opportunities to practice speaking, which was one of my main goals, so I also did the Pimsleur audio course for Icelandic, which drilled a lot of sentences that were likely to come up when traveling. And I also made a lot of those sentences and vocabulary into Anki flashcards, so I had learned and retained quite a bit from the online course as well as the Pimsleur course.
When we first arrived in Ísafjörður, Kirby and I were both immediately struck by the natural beauty of the area, but also… we had no real idea how to get to the dorms where we were supposed to be staying. We managed to figure out that there was a kind of taxi service that could get us to the dorms, but there was no one there to pick us up or give us any kind of instruction. (This kind of “hands-off” attitude from the program staff will be a common theme through much of this experience.) We got our ride to the dorms (just having told the driver to take us to the “university housing” or something like that), and while there were other students already moved in, there was no one from the program to help us into the rooms. Moreover, one of the rooms couldn’t be opened using the app that the program organizers had told us to download to unlock the rooms.
Eventually we found our way to the school building for the “get to know you” social, which also was meant to double as a kind of placement test. We got the room situation figured out, and soon after that the teachers introduced themselves and today us a bit about the program. They were using a lot of Icelandic at first, which was good for me in that I wanted to try to pick up as much as I could, but also, they were using language that was far beyond the level that we were supposed to have learned from the online course. As such, most of the students there couldn’t fully understand what the teachers were saying (myself included), and so they switched to English, to the applause of quite a few of the students.
After that, they showed us around the building and then the “get-to-know-you” social started, but Kirby wasn’t feeling well, so I went back to the dorms with them. This meant that I couldn’t really get a sense of what the levels were supposed to be, but I figured it would get sorted out. (Already I was starting to adopt the þetta reddast attitude, it seems.)
On the first day of class the following morning, I was assigned to A1 (the lowest level), but I was fine with that since I felt I hadn’t really learned all that much on my own anyway. The teacher started out with some more complex language (“I’m from… my native language is… I speak (these languages)…” etc.), which included some grammar that was kind of difficult for beginners, and not everyone was getting it. The teacher then asked if we wanted to focus on pronunciation and the alphabet, which just about everyone emphatically said yes to, and this was my first clue that the other students maybe hadn’t spent that much time on some of the basics the way that I had. But I decided to just go with the flow and find ways to make it interesting to myself (like writing phonological rules to describe the way the letters changed pronunciation, etc.).
Unfortunately, this teacher suddenly became very ill during class and had to be hospitalized. The A1 students were then ushered into A2 for the last hour, and then following day the B1 teacher was the sub for the first hour or so. It turned out that they had gotten another teacher to fly up to Ísafjörður to teach our class for the remaining two weeks, but of course the first flight coming into town wouldn’t land until about 10 in the morning. I quite enjoyed the way that this sub taught, trying to go for a more immersive approach, but with a lot of gesturing and drawing on the board to make her meaning clear to the class, in addition to sometimes using a bit of English. When the new teacher arrived, she also tried to use a more immersive approach, however she didn’t seem to have a good grasp on how to actually do this with adults who don’t have a foundation in the language.
With the new A1 teacher, it became clear rather quickly that she didn’t have a lot of experience with teaching Icelandic as a second language, and that she could previously go into a class without props or other visual materials to help us grasp the meaning of new words without translating them. She also quickly jumped into rather difficult grammatical structures without giving us the scaffolding that would be appropriate. For example, on the fourth day of the class, she introduced the rather innocuous question “how many … are there?”, but asking this question in Icelandic presents more difficulty than one might think.
For one, the structure itself, if translated literally, is “what are this many … ?” (Hvað eru þetta margir …?), which is not only quite different from the way that many languages typically form such a question (including other Germanic languages, though I’m not sure about the other Nordic languages), but the form of “many” depends on the gender of the noun it modifies. Icelandic retains the three-gender noun system from Old Norse, but this system is itself complicated by the many endings that each gender could have, not to mention that most of the students in the class didn’t already speak a language with grammatical gender, so this was already a difficult concept. And to add insult to injury, answering this question is further complicated by the fact that the numbers 1 to 4 have very different forms depending on the gender of the noun. So the teacher wasn’t just introducing this particular grammatical structure, but she also had to explain the concept of grammatical gender to a bunch of students that struggled with the idea, and also that the numbers used in the response to the target question changed depending on the gender of the noun. And prior to this, we had only covered some basic phrases used for making small talk and introducing oneself. So suffice it to say that it was a hard lesson.
After this class, I was feeling quite frustrated with the way that things were going: I wasn’t getting the kind of language practice that I was hoping for, since we didn’t have that many opportunities to actually use the language in class, and the pace that we were covering the material was much slower (and more meandering) than I would have liked. So with Kirby’s encouragement, I asked to go to the A2 class, which… turned out to not be much better. I had assumed that the expected language level in A2 would be higher, and therefore I’d be getting more of a challenge. And while this was in theory true, the issue was that the class was not taught in such a way that I actually got much more out of it. The A2 instructor had a tendency to lecture to us about the language rather than providing us with opportunities to actually speak in Icelandic. While there was at least one semi-successful impromptu conversation activity, most of the class time was spent just listening to the instructor talk about Icelandic in a mix of non-accommodating Icelandic, English, and German, generally spoken at a quick pace and with low volume. So most of it was going over the students’ heads, mine included. And on more than one occasion, when talking about a trickier aspect of Icelandic grammar which is arbitrary or otherwise requires some amount of memorization and drilling, he would say something like, “you just have to go learn this on your own”, which… made me wonder what I was paying for.
Suffice it to say that this was a disappointing development. In order to not completely zone out in class and to try to get something out of the experience, I ended up taking notes on what we were doing in the class, the topics the instructor would talk about — anything I could review to help me remember what happened in class, as without these notes my memories of each day would have all blurred together. I also would occasionally talk to classmates about their feelings about the class, and most people felt similarly to me, though those that had studied a good amount of Icelandic prior to the class seemed to be having a better time. As it turned out, the day that I started going to the A2 classes, someone from that group left A2 to join A1 because they had hoped to get more out of the instruction there, but… they were back to A2 a few days later anyway.
On the last day of classes, I asked the B1 instructor if I could sit in on her class, as I had taken some of the elective classes2 with her and I liked her way of teaching more (she also subbed the morning after the first A1 instructor fell ill). And finally I felt like I was in the right place. My level was certainly lower than most (if not all) of the other students, but I was challenged in a way that I was having to work to learn and use the language. And while I was happy to know that there was a level and instructor who could provide what I was looking for, I was saddened by the fact that I hadn’t tried to make this happen much sooner.
Now, one part of this experience that I have to take responsibility for myself is that I didn’t find ways to get what I wanted out of program on my own. That is, ideally I would have seen that the classes weren’t going to give me what I was hoping for, and instead I would have studied on my own or found other activities to help me improve my Icelandic and achieve my language learning goals. And while I did start to try to do this over the first weekend, I largely stopped when I started to realize that the program just wasn’t what I had imagined it to be, and I basically shut down and just went with the flow for the rest of my time there. So in light of this, and with the aim of doing this kind of trip again in the future, over the next few posts I’m going to describe ways I want to approach this next time around that will hopefully help me (and anyone else who may be interested in doing this kind of trip) achieve my language-learning goals.
- Side note: the idea of doing linguistic tourism in this way was also motivated by the dissociative episode that came along with this particular time in Mozart’s Birthplace, which I will talk more about in a later post. ↩︎
- These were classes that took place in the afternoon and were optional. They covered a variety of topics and types of activities. They were included in our tuition, but we were not expected or required to attend any of them. ↩︎
