How Peace Corps Volunteers Learn Languages Fast

if you joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer three things are certain you will get to travel on a unique passport you'll have a messy wild adventure and you'll probably come home speaking a different language I was part of the Boston tribes we had to learn conversational basso but what exactly are these languages why must they learn them and how do they do it let's find out how many technicians or Engineers how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world it came out of the 60s so it must be all about peace the Peace Corps is an organization run by the US government volunteers get a once in a lifetime and Leadership experience in a developing countries where they work in host communities to do something good you have a health volunteers education volunteers I myself was an agricultural business volunteer so it's mainly there for two things one to provide help for these countries that ask for it then also it's a diplomacy thing so that these countries like the United States more essentially it all started in the time following the Cold War JFK president John F Kennedy founded the Peace Corps and the idea was for Americans to serve their country and the world to get involved actively in the cause of democracy peace development and freedom problem is the whole world cannot speak English so they needed to learn languages and today please call language training has quite a reputation how it works is a country must first invite the Peace Corps then they decide which countries they can be active in remembering that the volunteers also need to be safe so you can be assigned as an education volunteer you can be assigned to health agriculture Community Economic Development which is basically business Youth and development and also environmental so that could be working on farms giving health education teaching underprivileged kids doing sports programs or even giving business training the main mission is to promote world peace and friendship and one really cool bonus is the chance to learn a new Language and Cultural skills and some of these countries have fascinating languages so there are two options you can go to a place where you already know the language or you can go to a place where you have to learn the language now during the first few months on the ground each volunteer is kind of training themselves there's all sorts of intensive job training and picking up the language is going to be really really important but it happens in a very natural way as you're about to hear so why call they just speak English and then pick up the most important local phrases well think about it a volunteer is basically doing a long Homestay with complete strangers in a foreign country often in a pretty rough environment it does you you want the community to like and accept you and you want to feel safe and confident or you won't be able to do your job so the key to fitting in is obvious learn their language and as you're going to see you don't exactly have a choice in the matter by the way if you want to go to a Spanish-speaking country the Peace Corps advises you to start learning Spanish now and most volunteers usually recommend getting a head start if you can so just because there are so many different people who apply to Peace Corps they post a lot of the positions as having a language requirement for Spanish or French just to weed out different people if you're applying to a country that speaks Spanish or French it will probably be a good idea to already speak a little bit of those languages and my advice for what it's worth is to make a habit of reading Spanish or French stories every single day you're never going to go wrong with stories as you know so for me uh when I applied to the Peace Corps when you apply you can select your top three countries for me Moldova wasn't one of my top three and then there's a little box below uh those three choices where you can say add any additional comments and I said that I would be sent anywhere where I can learn a new language because for me that was something I was very excited about something that I wanted to do as a volunteer at the moment there are more than 350 Peace Corps languages I found something quite nice on their website it's how to say the word peace in a bunch of languages which gives us a little clue about what the languages are a single country could teach anything from 1 to 20 languages but whether it's chichoa Albanian or Romanian the Peace Corps expects you to learn and work in the local language so of course your amazing new language all depends on which country you go to I took a look at the volunteer openings and Spanish proficiency comes up a lot even for Portuguese countries for example Portuguese is the official language of Mozambique Beacon volunteers will mainly work in Portuguese so they must learn this before any local languages but if you already know Spanish you actually have a better chance of getting into Mozambique or say you go to Peru in Peru you'll get full-on Technical Training and Hands-On practical experience in Spanish the volunteers who don't learn Spanish can fall behind in their training and can't complete work in their Community but there are other countries where people speak languages you've probably never even heard of so that's a very very different picture when you arrive in the country you'll be tested on the language but it's not that easy to get in because first you have to be invited so about two weeks later I got this email saying I've been matched to this country of Liberia I had no idea where that was I did a quick Google so I was in Africa and I saw I was going to be working as a high school chemistry teacher so I was like that is perfect it's kind of exactly what I wanted and that I had an interview coming up with it so the idea is to serve where you almost needed and this means that you have to apply tell them what your best skills are and then wait to see if they can use you somewhere but it's not a done deal the program is highly competitive with a 23 acceptance rate how that looks is 17 000 applications for fewer than 4 000 positions and if you get in they're gonna train you for three months they put a lot of time and effort into you so they want to make sure you're not going to be impacted by the difference in culture and you're okay being alone because the isolation is something major is that you are taken out of your country and put kind of by yourself out there in the middle of nowhere so they do kind of focus on that aspect of it it's like mentally you're okay with all this stuff that's going to be going on so when you first arrive in country and I'm talking about within the first two or three days you will be tested on your language proficiency of the language so when I first did my language proficiency interview when I got to Nicaragua two days into country I was really really nervous and I know I just told you guys not to be nervous about it but I was just nervous about it because I had grown up as a simultaneous bilingual and I like felt that it would be I don't know shameful if I got anything lower than advance so I was really nervous and I had my LPI interview and luckily I got Advance mid so this language proficiency interview Andrea is talking about happens before your service starts and there's another one at the end of your service what well I think you're gonna see why but there's a reason to be really happy about it you see the LPI is accredited by the American Council for teachers of foreign languages which is fantastic because you can put it on your resume at the end isn't that awesome so it is an interview it's all speaking and listening and there's no writing reading or test Quest it's just a person asking questions and putting you into a scenario and then you kind of do role play and you have to talk your way through a situation and then they can look and see how well you are at making your new sentences responding to their questions and they can gauge your level based on that the person who tests you won't be an American they'll be someone who is native in the language you're testing in especially trained by the Peace Corps and based on how you do they will place you should we see how the proficiency levels work I think we should they divide them into four main categories from novice to Superior and three subcategories of low middle and high for example a novice speaker is somebody who has minimal use of the language maybe you can answer a few questions or tell you what a few words mean but they can't really make their own sentences unless they're memorized while a superior speaking person can use opinions speak hypothetically really use all the different tenses talk about a story that went on over a long period of time and make their own sentences based on information that they know about the language and it really is a lot different than just the memorizing and responding to simple questions that a novice person would speak but basically all it is is they will have a native speaker who will be likely one of your teachers later on during training they will just have a conversation with you and then they're recording the conversation and then they'll go back and listen to it and then give you a proficiency rating then this grading determines which training town you are sent to which is cool because your whole group will be the same level as you did I mention the tests in the middle of your service I didn't my bad they will keep testing you on this language it usually happens about four times throughout the experience no there is no room for falling around here what happens if you fail your LPI so if you fail the LPI what could happen is still in the beginning training that training before you start your service Peace Corps might just to send you an well one-on-one tutor so you might have tutoring after hours after your language class you stay after and you do tutoring if it's really a significant delay you're really not catching on like um you're expected to then you might get a one-on-one teacher so all of your language training for PST will just be you with a language teacher and they're really going to try and get you to catch up and teach you how you learn best so great that they are willing to help you if you're struggling and they really do want you to make it but this is pretty serious business because you're not going to be living in the first world and you need to be able to look after yourself in Risky situations and the first tool any of us always has is of course language so let's say there's an emergency what happens if you're evacuated and you can't continue so if you are medically medically separated administratively separated if you eat tea if you or have an early termination any of these you are still entitled to have your language proficiency interview which will be accredited by the American Council of teachers of foreign languages which you can still put on your resume fantastic to hear that sounds pretty fair to me what do you think but of course if you don't improve on your language level things are not going to go your way you'll either be asked to leave which means you won't even get to swear in as a volunteer or if you're just under the required level they might offer you some extra tutoring and support for the early days but overall you really need to want this another thing that might happen is if you're still not passing your LPS Ai and it's time to go to site and they're worried about your safety or your ability to survive at your site without the language that you need they might just hold you back at the training center for a little while this does happen it happened when I was in the Peace Corps not a big deal what they'll do is they'll keep some volunteers back at the training center they will keep training you just on language every day they're going to be long days of language class you're gonna have a lot of practice there might be just you it might be a couple volunteers and you're really gonna learn a lot of language in that week and sometimes Peace Corps will even pay someone at your site to tutor you and this can be really helpful for picking up a specific dialect from your town I mean I would do this anyway just to get the dialect imagine all the stories you could listen to from the kids and the grannies and the interesting people around that's the absolute best part of living in any kind of former Community I really love it and stories are of course my thing and this whole channel is full of stories about language learning but stories don't just stop there on the ground because they wrote story learning we actually teach languages through stories too because stories are the best way to learn any languages how we've learned our first language is how we teach languages if you'd like to learn more about this I've put together a completely free story learning kit that shows you how to learn languages using the amazing power of story so if you're curious check out the link below in the description and claim your free story learning kit so one of the misconceptions is that you will be with your entire cohort during training this is actually not true we actually have different training towns so if you are in a different level from someone those different level groups will be in different training towns I found a sample training schedule to show you but remember it won't be the same schedule in every country another big part of the training is a Homestay AKA immersion my favorite thing overall so at the beginning of each volunteer service they're going to be paired with a local counterpart and that's who they're going to be working with to help train for the next two years of their service so we start with just these very very basic classes when we first arrive and then we're sent off to our uh host Villages for the summer for 10 weeks and when we arrive to those families we maybe know 10 20 words of Romanian at most and knowing the word does not mean you know how to use the word word so it's very scary when you're dropped off at that in with the first host family and for me I was just like gesturing and trying to use what I knew yeah so what happens next is intensive language and job training for 10 to 12 weeks and the language lessons happen with a mix of classroom field based learning and self-directed language learning this is a Thai dictionary that they gave us and I know I brought one from the state because this one's more of a dictionary and the other one's more of a phrase book this is our learning Thai language book it's a bunch of exercises and we work on it every day so you get your dictionary your books everything you need for the next 27 months get ready to live work and breathe in a new language it is pretty intense you are The Stranger in Town and you need to build trust but you can't do that if they can't understand you it sounds to me like your new language needs to become your new best friend your your soul mate you are everything so your first three months of service is training so they staged us at this little compound in the city of cockatoo which is outside the Capital One of the other major cities there and it's kind of like where they hold your hand and get you ready for everything that's gonna happen so first thing we pretty much instantly moved into our host family's house so they put each of us with a host family all around the city so my host family was amazing and I loved my time staying with them and my mom she still calls me all the time and I had seven little brothers and sisters so I have Jesse and Naomi and blessing and comfort and Martha Lynn Josephine and Augustine one of the amazing ways to feel positive thing so how do the lessons actually work well first you will get language classes Monday to Friday and lots of Hands-On practice such as activities with the local community class sizes are small three to six students and groups are assigned by a language level you'll also learn strategies to help you with your own language learning Journey you'll aim to be allowed to swear in as a volunteer sounds like they're swearing-in ceremony it really is the ultimate reward here go big or go home it is no walk in the park and the minimum language proficiency Benchmark is all about how well you can speak so who actually teaches these language classes let's see what Andrea says now who teaches these language classes so they're all nicaraguans and they work for Peace Corps in order to linguistically prepare you for your service and finally after 12 weeks the big day and that I will well and Faithfully charge in the before so help me God congratulations happened during week 11 and essentially that is the first time that you go solo to your site and you are not with staff you travel all by yourself to your site and you spend a week there with your host family to be and you meet all the teachers that you're going to be working with this is it guys finally the start of your service the real deal your two-year full immersion you're gonna soon be leading projects that will change lives forever living with a host family learning how they communicate and working locally it pretty much sounds like a heaven to me and for health Educators we also have to prep our lesson plans in Romanian and we teach in Romanian we do not teach in English some of us may have partners that speak English but for the most part our day is fully in Romanian while we're in our site and working with um other modulus because when you're you know going straight to school and expected to speak and interact with kids in another language it's something that you really need to feel comfortable with on you know at least on a certain level I learned French during training you do three months of training before going to your sites to be a volunteer in the the three months of training I was able to get to a level of proficiency where they were you know okay with me going and living by myself in this community it was hard at first being in in a new place speaking a new language and feeling that I I couldn't communicate so I was a lot of times just alone in my own head but slowly I became more and more confident in speaking French and then also at the same time started making friends in Burkina Faso our textbooks were really bad and ineffective so we didn't use them all that much instead before every class we would create these one-page worksheets and so the worksheet would give a summary of the lesson that we had gone over did for the day all of the vocabulary that we had done and also a homework worksheet at the bottom and we would translate the whole thing into Russian and kyrgyz and so when the kids were taking these home every day what we found out was that their parents were doing these worksheets with them and so it wasn't just the kids who were learning English the parents were using these worksheets to learn English themselves what makes this even more amazing is the Fantastic skills that the local counterpart also learns from the volunteer because after two years you're living them with English language skills that they can keep using to teach their own communities it's absolute gold when you have to leave it must feel like your soul is torn into uh do vetchness like here at the end you're the coolest I also my my sister taught me gigil Gigi like it's like I have it and you don't no no no no no no no upsells Amazon and she goes up so Sony John and every Armenian think that's hilarious so they start laughing I'm in or make make bites a lava chairs in the end volunteers will get the final language test it's the same test they did before except this time they're expected to get much better results I mean it has been long enough well a person can get pretty fluent in a language in two years and if you have Adventure in your bones and you want to do something great with a new language well I've got just the video for you right here [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Olly Richards

Views: 13,369

Keywords: language learning, how to learn a language, foreign languages, learn a language, learn languages, polyglot, learn a new language, languages, language, stories, storylearning, olly richards, peace, peace corps, study abroad, third world, philanthropy, service, homeschool, travel, learn language fast, learn languages fast, language learning plan, volunteer, travel abroad, disaster relief, teacher, school, teach, teach languages, teach english, tefl, tesol, ceolt

Id: FhLSoQP7HZw

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023