Open your books at page 62, “Preterit for dummies”...
We don’t often think about learning methods that differ from sitting on a school bench, writing down what the teachers says, and spending time with students who speak the same mother tongue as us and will use it as soon as the breaktime bell rings. And yet, how boring it is. What’s more, it’s expensive.
Whereas… if you go out there, if you leave your bench and your old habits, if you travel across borders, across language barriers, well… eventually, you’ll talk. Or rather you’ll dare talk. After that, the rest will come quickly, because immersing yourself in a culture, in a family, in a village or in a project will highly increase your learning speed. For real.
Let’s give meaning to languages, for God’s sake!
By offering international volunteering projects in over 70 countries, language trips that combine language learning sessions AND voluntary projects, and ethno-linguistic trips that guide you through new cultures, the SVI offers you a language learning process that makes sense.
A language is not an end in itself, it is a tool for meeting new people
Juggling with complicated verb tenses might be fun for linguists or schoolteachers, I admit. But was I receptive to those kinds of exercises? Not that I can remember…
However, if someone had told me back then that such phrase or such verb form was commonly used in English and that it would later enable me to interact with the speakers of this language, I would’ve probably been a bit more attentive! 😉
Whether it is through a trip, a voluntary project, or anything, learning a language is always a way to discover each other’s way of life. That is what the SVI stands for.