April 15, 2014 at 09:35How I Learned English in Africa
Cape of Good Hope
I have trouble with English. The fact is that I taught him on MS-DOS and Pascal, and then on films. Therefore, I learned to read and translate in our direction well, but to build sentences on the fly for conversation - no. And it is very necessary, because Mosigra has more and more partners in Europe. I think you don’t have such problems, but sometimes a desire to refuel a tractor appears - and almost everyone really needs live English.
My arrival: Switzerland, Emirates, Germany, Canada, France
Therefore, without thinking twice, I went to South Africa. There were three quick visa options with warm weather: Malta (where the Chinese are among the students and the island can be bypassed in two days), Dublin (with a very interesting accent) and Cape Town (UK colony). Therefore - down, beyond the equator, and to the very edge of the inhabited world. To Africa, to furry elephants and penguins digging holes.
English
There are two well-known schools in the city - these are EF and EC (mine). Classes were as follows: 9:00 - 10:30 reading and writing, 11:00 - 12:30 - talking and listening, 13:30 - 15:00 - profile classes (for the "intensive" course). After usually a master class or some kind of school activity. I took three weeks. I must say right away that it is better to take either two weeks (just for immersion in the environment and the search for weaknesses), or just a month or more. And necessarily - an intensive course, since the difference in price is only about 2-3 thousand rubles, and there are one and a half times more classes.
Before that, I took a tutor for five classes back in Moscow: I remembered the main times, wrote a bunch of business letters, discussed my work and put on a pronunciation a little. It helped a lot in passing the entrance test and orientation in the city.
A meeting
On the spot we were met by a specially trained comrade of bright chocolate color, who, instead of immediately shoving into the bus, took me to change money at the airport and buy a SIM card. Very correct and wise. Right on the road, 2G Internet was picked up first, then 3G. Then in the LTE zone they offered to jump on it, but it seemed to me that 10 Mb / s on 3G was just what was needed in order to manage to cancel the download of something unnecessary. By the way, the gigabytes in the starter pack were given honest - the one in which 1024 megabytes, consisting, in turn, of 1024 kilobytes each. Just a surprise after our telecoms.
By the way, the main condition for the agency that did everything was free fast Wi-Fi at the hotel. Of course, this agency completely failed.
On the bus, the driver handed the package with instructions for the first time. They were in English, and some students did some good workout with dictionaries before they realized what was there. The basics are how to call a taxi, where to get water, emergency phone numbers, safety in the city, when you come to school for instruction, basic etiquette, typical mistakes of tourists (in particular, looking in the wrong direction on a right-hand drive road). Map to school.
Students who arrived for a month or more stayed in families (for exchange), but I went to the "residence" - something like a hostel, beaten up by numbers of different sizes. There were students from hotels, but most of all were lucky those who simply rented apartments in a nearby suburb. In general, up to a month, the hotel is good for those who more or less say the residence is for everyone.
There were no Russians, except me. But the assortment included people from Switzerland, Brazil, Eastern countries, a couple of Canadians, a couple of Turks and one very peppy Chinese with three thousand friends on Facebook (How? Is it like they have it closed?). Not very sociable, began to be.
Internet and sockets
Wifi seems to be conditionally there, but it's stupidly not. Cafes give 50 megabytes per day in a single network (that is, you can’t walk from one to another), and in half the cases this network does not plow at all. The school has Wi-Fi, but it gave out stable 300 baud, since the main bands were captured by Skype - and this thing at our admin had the properties of gas and occupied the entire available channel in priority. As a result, it only remained to use its own cellular Internet. It is quite expensive - about 1400 Russian rubles for a package of 5 gigabytes. This package was enough for me for 3 weeks, by the way - apple devices and the seventh Windows with antivirus cheerfully chewed up three-throat traffic for a photo stream and technical exchange.
Adapters to all phones and sockets on the flea market - most likely, almost all stolen
At the same time, the last time I downloaded only the headers of letters and went without graphics during the dialup, my consumption rarely exceeded 5 megabytes per day. The reality was somewhat unexpected.
Sockets are not ours, but adapters are in almost any store. The first day is possible without an adapter with a toothpick and some kind of mother - for my charging from a black and white Nokia, the food was quite suitable.
Once again the Cape of Good Hope
The first day at school
At the entrance to the school we were given a nipple. In fact, as it turned out, water bottles are the basis of survival in Africa. Almost everyone has one always with them. There are no glasses anywhere - if you see a tank of water, substitute your bottle. I was very struck by these bottles in the same department as stationery and pencil cases: this is what the child definitely needs to go to school.
Then we filled out a couple of pieces of paper, had breakfast, and talked for 5 minutes with future teachers. They value conversational skills and just get to know each other. It was a surprise that for “I shall” one and a half points are copied, for “I will” one, and only “I'll” will be correct in colloquial speech. At this stage, the most important question was: "Why do you need a language." The distribution of afternoon classes depends on this. There are all sorts of "Cultural differences", "Epos", "Etiquette" and so on. The most difficult is business English, but it is at the Advanced level. It was he who I clearly aimed at, although I always considered myself intermediate.
Then - a test. First, on the grammar (tenses, general knowledge of the structure of sentences, all kinds of must / should, used to, gerund, using Present Progressive and Simple to describe future events, Past Simple to express wishes in the present and so on). I stupidly did not understand half of this, but it turned out to be pretty easy to guess, since almost all examples were found in books or game rules.
Part Two - Dialogson which you need to answer questions. They are difficult for beginners. Here is an example: a woman can crucify for three minutes about her new Ferrari, how the engine rumbled at her, how cool to drive her shops, and then say: “Well, I taxied for half a day, and my leg got sick, look?”. And I must say with whom she speaks: a friend, a technician or a doctor. The second part is a long text that needs to be fixed by facts. We had a psychological research on Facebook likes with a lot of numbers.
Part Three - Reading. It is necessary to read the text and answer questions about it. The questions were a little undercut, the correct answer a couple of times was “I don’t know” - keep in mind. As picking in the test after the test showed, the compilers were not always friends with the logic: if in the text “almost everyone does this”, then choosing “some don't do this” from the options, and you had to take the second one.
Final essay. You can choose from 2-3 topics such as “you went on a plane and don’t know where it flies” or “tell us about your favorite place”, or “how would you celebrate your birthday”. Since I was firmly convinced only of the perfect knowledge of Present Simple, I chose about my favorite place. As it turned out later, they did not evaluate the grammar, but the breadth of the dictionary, the ability to build complex sentences, the imagery of the language, and the presentation style for the situation. If you are not sure, it is better to write in short - the number of jambs is considered, and not their percentage to the volume of the text.
They have tests with a true random number generator in the answers. That is, for example, in a group of 10 questions with 3 options for each, there may not be a single correct answer B.
After an hour I was given the highest score in the stream. Not enough 3% to Advanced. And immediately began a lesson in business English.
Business English
This is something crazy and cool. You break into an already ongoing course and just pick up on the fly what everyone else is doing. The teacher is an elderly man Yang. Stubborn as an old professor at a university, impatient, grumbles in places.
The group included two Germans with an MBA in finance (team leader Chris from HTC and Christina from Lufthansa, a specialist in process outsourcing); bearded Persian Ibrahim, IT specialist from telecom; cunning Arab Almadin, engineer; the beautiful Nadine Marie (Italian, living in Germany from the tech support Leica) and Marianne (from Brazil, an intern at the telecom call center).
The lessons went wildly. As a rule, at first we were given the rules of the language: for example, how to ask direct and indirect questions correctly, how to structure the question in such a way as to get as much information as possible from the interlocutor, and how to give the necessary emotional coloring to the question. For example, I did not know that “Could you, please ...” and “Please, could you ...” are two big differences. After the theory, we practiced writing (most often, we collected text from pieces or supplemented sentences in the right way). Then - they listened to some guru on this issue with a radio interview (for example, during negotiations - CEO of Coca-Cola, on service - the head of a network of expensive boutiques and so on). Answered questions on the text. Then they conducted their negotiations. Ian could beat us into teams by giving an introduction to a business case (like, solve the problem with pirated discs on the Titan network - one team for journalists, the second for the PR team), conduct HR interviews with employees, or so on. At one of the classes, he brought 10 letters to the Samsung support and gave three calls plus one message on the answering machine to listen - it was necessary to prioritize each incident and draw corrective measures in a limited budget. What pleased all situations of life, albeit a decade ago. Mostly from the IT sector. all situations are vital, albeit ten years ago. Mostly from the IT sector. all situations are vital, albeit ten years ago. Mostly from the IT sector.
Nadine Marie is trying to explain something to Ibrahim
We immediately somehow did not work out with cultural differences. The Arabs together pressed clients deaf, like, paid - take a walk, this is not our problem anymore. Due to professional European deformations, Nadine Marie believed that the client should be reassured, but nothing practical should be done. Marianne did not understand half the cases, because she could not distinguish speech due to the accent. The Germans and I stood for good service. As a result, we played democracy by pulling Nadine-Marie to our side, or simply exhausted Ibrahim and Almadin to the limit with a bunch of demands, after which they made concessions. By the end of the second week, the Germans went to an individual teacher, and I learned to use the weakness of the position “you to me, I to you”, re-read “Modern Diplomacy” and at the same time brought to my colleagues the understanding that if the client doesn’t get along with the goods - it's not his problem and ours, because it depends on it whether he will buy the next one or not. Ian was glad that instead of “No way” this Russian learned to say something like “It's too difficult to us”.
Morning classes
They turned out to be simpler after business English. In my case, the clue is commonplace - morning classes went to the Upper Intermediate level (because I wrote and talked sucks), and business - to Advanced.
Learning was easy. I had three problems - inability to use times according to the situation, constant misses with articles and crooked prepositions. We resolved the articles immediately after they explained to me who the noun is - since I did not go through the theory, this was a breakthrough. I continue to squint with prepositions, but already less - they need to be taught. It went slower at times. I already knew and was able to Simple group, then there were two classes about the differences between Perfect and Simple on concrete examples with quizzes and writing stories - I was lucky. And then it turned out to be very simple. We did a little work with pronunciation, and everything became tip-top. After correcting “the” to the right soft, taxi drivers began to take me for a local one, so I immediately felt the benefit of English.
Then I went at the level of "three nines." I was overtaken by the peppy African Tamir and the same beautiful Nadine Marie (when I passed the exit test, she switched to the Advanced level). The rest of the group studied without much initiative. Namely, it depended on how quickly knowledge is applied. That is, if you go, you need to literally gnaw knowledge, this dramatically increases efficiency.
What did you do in class? Sometimes they sorted out how to write letters, then read examples, then wrote letters to each other and answered them - on different set topics with a description of the situation. For example: “You parked near a tree, the sign was not visible. He returned - a fine under the janitor. Write a letter to the council saying that you were fined in vain. ” Or: "Here is the cousin sent you a letter with the attachment, answer her in the same style." And they gave a letter and an attachment.
Studying was fast.
The teachers were great. The first class was taught by Mateus Gerhardus Bosman. The dude seemed rustic at first, but the way he steeply resolved different situations made me take a closer look and think. In fact, he was very cool in terms of knowledge transfer. The second class was led by the British fighting grandmother Linda, who was distinguished by her sincere good-naturedness, iron character and, beyond her years, deep knowledge of IT and jargon. “So you would tweet like that? Not. Write just4u, even though it infuriates me! ”
Hardy Teaches Us to Tell Stories
Linda Grandma
A week later, a young Amy was put in her place - she generally worked as an undeveloped trainee. If Hardy and Linda could keep an audience of about 100 calm, Amy would be “blown away” by the top ten. What happened, actually. She was replaced by Warren - a lively dude with an incredibly fast speech, able to sit in Turkish right on the table. He immediately threw out the textbook and began giving us real English from all sorts of newspaper clippings, asking complex questions and generally making us think and communicate.
Warren "as is"
Electives
Firstly, you can always go to the center of speech. There are tape recorders, books and CDs with audio recordings. You take the “Oliver Twist”, insert the disc, hook on the headphones and listen. As you might imagine, it is just as easily available in Russia with the help of films or audio books, and may be one of the best ways to learn a language.
Class for listening and books in it:
Secondly, there were master classes, but they turned out mainly for pre-intermediate, that is, slightly boring. I had enough emotions in business English. Instead of a master class, you could go anywhere or participate in an event from the school.
Third, school activity. I went for a walk around the city (the practice of listening to the guide is at the level: "Do you speak bad? Try to sit here in this bar. I had one student who took two beers and started talking fluently. Ahh, don’t drink? Well, then blow for our student from France: you’ll talk like nice! ”). The second was a city tour by bus - we were given a colored dude with a monstrous accent, whose speech had yet to be made out. He spoke slowly, in simple words, and complained that he was used as a textbook for the second generation of students.
School Internet Center
There was much more, but then I just fit into groups with British tourists in the Cape Town tourism center, which immediately solved a bunch of issues. There is nothing worse than a curious British grandmother, who firmly decided to instruct the young man in her divine language during an 8-hour trip. And there is nothing cooler than an old oil engineer from Canada, who, suddenly, read my grandfather's book - and with whom we found a bunch of things to discuss.
Once every three weeks, a recertification takes place - this is the same entrance test, but this time you can write it better and get a level-up. For this you will be transferred to a group older, where again you will have to remember the names of everyone in the class. You can go to the group below only on condition that you don’t get into what’s happening at all - but this will happen long before the test. But even if you don’t hand it over, you’ll still be poured a couple of newcomers, because the new set. You can be promoted even earlier than it should be - there can not be less than 4 students in a class, so if somewhere below the shortfall, you are temporarily raised with a pair of points that are not enough to the right level. Catch up with the cycle - approx.
Hint: if something is wrong, you must first politely ask for a test to work on errors, learn obscure places, and then the next day say that you were sick, drunk and, in general, it was your twin brother, known throughout city moron. Plus, he wrote off another option from the Chinese from the second desk. All this must be calmly and thoroughly stated to the course coordinator - then they will let you retake right on the spot, which in 70% of cases leads to an increase in the level. Because they love initiative here.
Advice
- In classes, almost everyone works in pairs. Therefore, it is very important to understand who is sitting, and to sit either next to the strongest in the language, or next to a beautiful girl. Classes are usually for 6-10 people, the location is a "round table". Mathematical expectation is optimal at positions No. 3 and No. 4 from the teacher in a clockwise direction. Residents of the East read the other way, so do not sit counterclockwise, otherwise you will study Arabic instead of a European accent.
- When you take tours - always try to sit right next to the guide. If the road is distant (like a safari) - he will want to talk, and he will talk with you. Given that the pronunciation here is either pure British or African home, this will be mega-useful. On tours, ask a maximum of questions, even stupid ones. The main thing is to practice the language.
- Talk to everyone. Ask the waiters to tell the story of the cafe, museum staff - tell about this place, ask taxi drivers about life. But! In a taxi, first pronounce your destination in impeccable English and specify the price, and only then give out that you are not local. They have counters, but when they see a foreigner, they may well include it at a nightly rate, for example. Taxi drivers always know the price to the destination on the meter with an accuracy of 5%.
- Feel free to say that you are learning English, and ask to repeat the last phrase again. Slow down. In other words. Learn polite phrases for this on the first day. In the city everyone understands everything and goes to meet you. The important thing is not to say this to those with whom you have yet to bargain.
- Prepare business cards with mail and your FB profile. FB taxis here.
- Students are grouped by ethnicity. There are no Russians there. It is optimal either to immediately establish close relations with bright individuals (do not confuse them with outsiders), or be friends with the Chinese. The Chinese are almost Russian. Swiss people do not like each other, so you can communicate with them. However, if you are for two weeks, it is better to spend the first break on food, and a large one (an hour long) - on walking around the city and talking with residents.
- Since this is Africa, it is very important to go on a garden safari - this is 5 days in the best case. Make a visa 5 days longer than training, score for studies, tell the coordinator that you are on a safari from Friday to Wednesday - and move towards adventures. Missed time is added to the course at the end. If it doesn’t add up with a visa, exchange it for individual lessons at the 1: 4 rate. And consider the situation with the hotel - paying for five extra days is not very fun. But to go without 3-4 lessons is also not very - you need to have time to immerse yourself in the language environment, otherwise you won’t understand anything if the guide has at least some emphasis.
My morning class
Miscellaneous
Food is all cheap. Crime is high, mainly robbery at night. At night it is better to sit at home or walk without a camera. In hotels and other locked rooms they do not steal too much. The currency (rand) changes from the dollar and the euro, but you can pay by card with anything, anywhere. Bus tickets - RFID cards, cheap and cool. Malaria is 100 kilometers higher; vaccinations are not needed. People are all friendly, but without any extra sentiment.
Result
A completely English environment has done its job. I learned how to more or less freely maintain a conversation, to distinguish even relatively hellish accents in quick speech, learned an incredible amount of new words from conversational vocabulary and clarified several nuances of conveying meaning with different tools. Satisfied, of course. The only negative - for another three days after arrival, I caught in Russian speech English words like "this is our main point." Fortunately, I was able to lime them pretty quickly. Yes, they also gave some kind of a big beautiful piece of paper about my level of English, but I hollowed it out.
KDPV
Beach with penguins. These devils really live in Africa and really dig holes. Such strange birds:
Table Mountain:
Sudden Tree:
Mounted Elephants:
Lion in the bush:
Food:
About South Africa and IT specialists there
Habr cake. After a post about a steampunk coffee house, I met ZatriX there , with whom we suddenly had common acquaintances from the good old AD&D. And called on Habr. He has been living in Africa for 20 years and can tell all-all-all about IT there and local features. Starting from a special Cossack regiment, who fought a century ago on the side of the Boers, and ending with the enchanting method of stealing a cable using an old pickup truck, a wooden reel and a bottle of kerosene. By the way, he finally explained to me who needs a stolen twisted pair and why. UPD: Now this is a beautiful story.