Trying out my skills in Romanian

Last week I was invited to a conference in Romania. Beside some valuable intercultural experience that I could make, the 2-hours trip back to the airport which I spent in a cab was very interesting, because it showed me that there is still a lot to do in the development of self-teaching material. I had bought myself a language guide “Last-Minute Romanian”. I had practically no knowledge of Romanian (and it is a Romanic language very different from the other Romanic languages I know). I had manage to do 12 of the 20 lessons, but they did not allow me to talk with the driver in an efficient (and sometimes not even in an effective) way.

• The situations that had been covered by the lessons did not help me here.
• The lessons presented only people who already know Romanian so that I had not learned sentences that mean “Slowlier, please” or “I don’t understand”.
• I had not learned to produce an internationalism in Romanian.
• The book included only a Romanian-German, but not a German-Romanian glossary. It was also interesting how the driver started to speak not proper Romanian, but “foreigner Romanian” or “telegramm Romanian”.

If we hadn’t been forced to be together for two hours (in his cab), then the conversation would soon have been over.

Joachim Grzega

Upcoming events

My first events at the Akademie Schönbühl are set:

2 April:

introduction to Basic Global English for a general public

15 May:

1. introduction to Basic Global English for compulsory school teachers

2. introduction to Lernen durch Lehren (LdL) (for teachers)

3. how can we use Wikipedia and its sister projects) (for students, teachers, parents and everyone)

19 June:

1. what does user-friendly language look like? (for business people and administration people)

2. how do I learn effectively and efficiently? (for students, teachers, parents and everyone)

3. edutainment on communicative behaviour around the world (for everyone)

I’m also eagerly working on my edutainment lecture “Ausländisch für Anfänger” that I will give to a general audience next week.

Joachim Grzega

Contributing to the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue

2008 has been the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. This was the reason that we started an international project on European communicative strategies in April. Researchers (professors and students from a broad range of European countries) have participated in this project over the past months and contributed to a 202-page long special issue of my Journal for EuroLinguistiX, which is now available via the ELiX homepage or directly here. This volume also includes

• an empirical report on the recent developments of my BGE projects
• a basic European language guide (a synopsis of common European communicative strategies and equivalences of important sentences in different European languages)

Joachim Grzega

BGE centerstage

Just 2 hours ago, I finished a lecture with discussion on BGE at a student club. The overall title of my presentation was “On the European Year of Intercultural Dialog”. Very interesting discussion.

In a few hours I will lead a BGE lesson with my kids at elementary school again. Another reporter from the Bayerischer Rundfunk will visit us.

People’s interest in, and our work on, materials for self-educated BGE also continues. The material shall consist of
1. an English book as the necessary and sufficient basis
2. a book with the metalinguistic explanations of the basic book in various the learner’s language, an audio CD and an exercise CD-Rom as “luxury equipments”.