Did you take language courses when you were high school? Do you remember any language from them? And ultimately, do you think they were worth your time?
I took three Spanish classes during my first two years of high school in Southern California and learned practically nothing. Despite spending an hour each day in class and doing homework assignments, my Spanish-speaking ability was dismal. I found the classes rather dull and repetitive. Not to mention a few class clowns kept sidetracking the class to speaking English rather than Spanish, so there was even less learning.
Meanwhile, to do a quick comparison, I became nearly fluent in Swedish while attending a Swedish language summer camp in Minnesota that is a part of Concordia Language Villages, a branch of Concordia College. I even earned high school language credit!
If I could turn back the clock, I prefer to have done all my language requirements through this summer camp rather than through a traditional language high school class.
Before I go into more detail about my personal experience, I want to mention that Concordia Language Villages are located in the North Woods of Minnesota. They currently consist of 15 camps focusing on different languages: Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, French, Korean, English, Danish, Russian, Chinese, German and Japanese. The camps offer programs with different time durations, for example, sessions for one-week, two-weeks, four-weeks or a one-day activity program. Programs are offered for children and adults. Those who attend are called “villagers”.
How did I come across the Swedish language camp?
During my Sophomore year of high school my mom learned about a Swedish language camp in Minnesota through a Swedish-American organization she was involved with. She asked if I would like to do a two-week camp session. I thought, a two-week summer trip to another state? Sure, why not.
I applied for scholarships from the Swedish-American organization to attend the camp, and won. The scholarship greatly helped with affording the cost of attending camp. (I will note that Concordia Language Villages also offers scholarship opportunities, and will likely be able to point applicants to other scholarship sources).
Soon I was on a plane flying from Southern California to Minnesota. I found my way to the camp meetup table at the Minneapolis airport and was directed to a bus that transported other villagers and me to the campsite.
I’ll sum up my time at camp.. Wow! I was blown away by how fun it was.
Upon arrival camp counselors were so excited to see us and only spoke Swedish. I was intimidated at first with not understanding them, but they had big smiles and used a lot of hand gestures to direct me where to go.
Other villagers who had previously attended also saw I was confused and quickly stepped in to help guide me on what to do. Some villagers were even fluent and were able to understand the counselors with ease.
During the two weeks there I learned about Swedish culture, food, history, music and more. I also learned far more language compared to what I had learned in the Spanish classes I had taken in high school.
One of my favorite days during the session was when all of the camps met together for a massive culture day. Each camp did a performance to display aspects of the country and language they represented. There was also a massive market where candy and items from different countries were sold. It was so fun.
I ended up attending camp for four summers, two summers for two-weeks and then two summers for a month. I did enough language activity during the month-long sessions to meet language requirements for high school. As a result I was able to opt out of language courses in school, giving me more selection to choose classes I was more interested in taking.
My one critique of the camp I attended is that it gave me an overly optimistic perspective of Sweden. As you can imagine, constantly doing fun things with upbeat counselors made me assume Sweden would be just as fun.
I eventually went to Sweden as a foreign exchange student. While I did observe many of the things the camp mentioned, I also observed Sweden was not as interesting as what I assumed (sorry Sweden!). I would have preferred to have been clued in more about what Swedish society is really like, the good and bad, partly for my own knowledge and partly to help me integrate more easily in Sweden.
Beyond that, however, I am a big supporter of Concordia Language Villages. I think they offer great programs to young people that help them learn more about the world, while also giving the opportunity to obtain school language credit.
For more information about Concordia Language Villages, visit this link.
Lauren Ell was born and raised in Southern California. She was raised in what she calls a “secular” Christian household. She has been living in Sweden since 2016 with her Swedish partner, and gave birth to her first child in 2019.