I’ve talked about my year abroad before – mostly in terms of the travel I did between my work and the places I went.
I did a degree in French & Spanish. I don’t really speak any Spanish anymore; my French is a little better than I’d expected it to be. If you’re a normal student doing languages, you’re expected to spend your third year in a country where your language is spoken. The rules are much more flexible for mature students who have lives & commitments that can’t so easily be thrown aside for a year.
I went to Neuchâtel in western Switzerland for my French and I was supposed to move to Oviedo in northern Spain in the February for my Spanish. That didn’t happen. For the bigger picture, I wish I’d gone ahead with it but at the time, it felt unthinkable and my teachers back home were ok with it. It made sense at the time to make big improvements to one language over a year than small improvements to both languages. Plus I had friends and had settled and I didn’t want to move on my own to a new country for the second time in six months.
You had three options, basically. You could get a job (hahahahaha no), you could work as a language assistance in a school (where you’d have to find your own accommodation) or you could go and study at a partner university under the Erasmus exchange programme. Actually, Switzerland, not being in the EU, wasn’t in Erasmus but they’d partnered anyway and rather than the Erasmus money, I got a small grant from the Swiss government to study there.
I became a member of the Université de Neuchâtel (UniNE) – specifically the Institut de langue et civilisation françaises (ILCF). Yes, I still have to look up that title every time.
The ILCF is a language school set up in 1892 to teach French to students from non-French-speaking parts of Switzerland. These days there are about 400 students there, some full time language students, others part-time alongside their real studies at the main building. And the vast majority are overseas students. I knew three Swiss students in my year.
We started the year with tests and we were then streamed for certain subjects. I was in bottom for grammar, middle for vocabulary and top for orthography. Work started at 8am, took a long break in the middle of the day (the all-important Swiss pause – the less-infamous version of the Spanish siesta – it even popped up in the film of the Da Vinci Code, courtesy of Jean Reno) and finished relatively late. But as per my home university, the modules you chose gave a certain amount of flexibility. I wish I could find my old timetable. I’m pretty sure I finished at lunchtime on at least two days and I think I had one day off altogether. But I managed to fit in 60 compulsory credits – 17 teaching hours a week, according to the current info on the website, plus 8 credits/2 hours of translation module, which was optional at ILCF but not optional in our exchange programme.
I liked translation. Apart from anything else, it introduced me to Roald Dahl’s adult books and of all the samples of work I stuck in my scrapbook, the translation piece got the highest mark. ILCF marks out of 6, which is weird.
Other than the fact that it started at 8am four mornings a week, including Mondays, I quite liked grammar. I liked vocabulary, I liked orthography a lot. I was in two minds about the language lab because I have never liked talking to a computer. I liked phonetics. I don’t remember having any opinion on written and spoken expression.
I never liked Civilisation. You chose a period, either 1700-1850 or 1850-2000, and studied Civilisation and Literature of that period. Literature wasn’t so bad – well, it was. One thing I got out of a language degree was the knowledge that I loathed literature and especially the brand of pretentious French literature that got shoved down us. But I didn’t get on with Civilisation, which was basically endless history lectures. I didn’t speak enough French to follow much and I wasn’t interested and it wasn’t until the exams at the end of the year that I discovered it had all been about the Industrial Revolution. A whole year, that passed me by. I’m definitely more into the language than the literature. It inspired me to take all the linguistics modules in my fourth year when I got home.
As for the key question, surviving: I had two very close friends. Jemma was from my home uni, although I’d never met her before, and Angela, from Utah, was the only other native English speaker in our year. We became triplets. We virtually lived together. We spoke English out of lessons, which is part of the reason why all three of us failed our end of year exams – we didn’t immerse ourselves in the language.
But I don’t care. I didn’t at the time, not really. I did enough to get the credits needed to go into my final year and that was all that mattered. That and I enjoy writing Université de Neuchâtel on my CV.
So I didn’t gain any spectacular language skills on my year abroad. The most important thing I brought back was this:
If you wait for other people, you’ll never do anything.
Jemma and Angela travelled around a little bit but not as much as I wanted to. I waited for them to say yes and then I realised I could get to the end of my semester there without having left Neuchâtel more than two or three times. And that wasn’t an option!
So I learnt to get around on my own, to not be scared of being on my own, to like being on my own. I learnt to read timetables. I learnt how read guidebooks and see in them what I was interested in. I learnt how to plan my trips out. I learnt how not to plan, how to let the day take me. I learnt to “sit in the grass and do nothing”.
Switzerland is a great place to learn those early lessons: it has a famously perfect public transport system which makes getting around very easy. It’s very safe. It’s very varied and beautiful. Almost everyone speaks English. I tried French in German-speaking east Switzerland on the grounds that it was better to use a Swiss language, even if it wasn’t the local one. But no. ILCF was set up for a reason. Swiss-Germans don’t necessarily speak French and are far more likely to speak English.
I now wonder why I never did any overnight trips. I had weekends, at the very least. I could have seen far more of Graubunden & Ticino if I didn’t have to get back to the far west by midnight. Metaphorically speaking. I could come & go as I wished, as long as I made it to lessons.
When I wasn’t exploring, i went out with Jemma and Angela. We had our favourite cafe, bar, pizza place and bookshop. We went to Angela’s apartment down the lake at Cortaillod. I printed my photos and made a scrapbook (I… ummm… lost wifi access pour des gros telechargements relatively early on. Stupid.)
I also learned to take a plane by myself. I first did that at fourteen in Italy (read my origin story here) but this time I was more aware of what was going on. I flew home at Christmas, Geneva to Bristol on easyJet. First passenger to check in, boarding card number A1. I flew back alone in the New Year.
I had to go through the bureaucracy. I had to pay a deposit on my room. That meant I needed a local bank account – a real Swiss bank account in the Neuchâtel Cantonal Bank. For my rent, I had a Post Office bank account – my grant came in the form of a cheque that was not payable into a UK account, although I posted it home for my parents to try. It got posted back. To get my accounts I needed a residence permit – I had to register, with my student card, at the police station to get this documentation. My data clearly got mixed up with Jemma’s because my student card was valid for a year, even though I was supposed to be leaving after six months, while hers expired in March. I don’t think I’d ever have sorted all this out alone – I think I’d still be wandering around Neuchâtel looking lost if not for Jemma and Angela.
That’s how to survive studying abroad. Make friends with the people who speak your language. And then go and send them a Facebook message to say hi, I was just thinking of you.