garyb wrote:Cavesa wrote:When the "language tandem" project at your faculty initially gets your hopes up and then completely disappoints you, once you find out the details. The only exchange is English-Czech. I would love to help the international students in the English parallel class with Czech (especially for the good of the patients). But English is worthless to me not only because of my focus on other languages. Most are not native speakers and some don't even speak as well as you'd expect. It is hard to make unofficial exchanges, because we are so separated we don't even meet much, and they are not interested in Czech unless they are forced to by the faculty, that's why an official Tandem "class" was needed. I would have loved it so much to learn their languages, get more Spanish practice, or learn something like Farsi!
That's a shame! Most exchange events are disappointing, but they're always worth a try. I actually went to Tandem events at my alma mater for a while since I had student friends there, and like most it was hit-or-miss but great sometimes. There were tables for the popular languages and you could often find a few speakers of more "exotic" ones at the English table. Then they closed it off so that only students and staff of the Uni could attend, which is fair although it meant losing many of the non-English natives. I felt like there was also potential for unofficial exchanges, but that might just have been my "grass is greener on the other side" ex-student vision! It's true that international students don't tend to mix much with the locals, but there are exceptions and if you're lucky you might get an "in" for the Erasmus bubble. I dated an exchange student for a few months and some of the parties we ended up at were a language learner's dream!
There were also groups like a "French society" that attracted both learners and native speakers, and even theatre groups that put on plays in different languages! Of course I never went so I don't know if they were what they were cracked up to be, but any opportunity to meet natives could be a good thing.
There is a huge difference between the anglophone and our universities. In the anglophone countries, the University is the basic unit, so there is more space for projects for everyone together, and it is easier to put together a group like those putting on plays in a foreign language. Here, it is about the faculty. The rest of the university could disappear and nothing would change for the students of one individual faculty, and you can imagine the medical students are not famous for non medicine related extracurricular activities. Officially, you can take a subject elsewhere but our faculty makes it complicated and the other faculties don't have tons of free spaces in their language classes either, and they take primarily their students.
I am not talking primarily about the Erasmus. I am talking about the customers buying the easier MD here. They don't really care about learning Czech and not even the part of the studies happening in hospitals (the most important part) is a good enough reason for them, so looking for an exchange partner unofficially is not an efficient way. Their English (the official language of their education) is very often not native, so there is no value in it for me, my medical English is good (definitely much better than that of our medical English teachers, but that is not hard). So, the Tandem class giving the foreigners credits for giving a damn about Czech for once is a rare occasion for a language exchange for the Czechs. It is heavily organised (as the official description says), you get a theme for every class and some papers to start from, and there is definitely no place to have the other person help me with my Spanish instead of the worthless English practice.