Foreign Perspectives

The English language course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being one of the hardest of all the courses that the university do.

Yet, although I’m getting consistently in the 90% mark for assignments, I’m starting to find that it’s one of the most boring courses that I’ve every done. If nothing else, that knocks down my theory that I always got good marks in subjects that I liked!

Having said that, it’s boring because of a peculiarity of the way in which the degree programme that I’m following is constructed. It’s a modern languages degree which most people would take to mean that it’s about foreign languages. Well, it is, mostly but you have to do one English language course to meet the degree requirements. The snag with that is that the French and Spanish programmes which I’ve already completed covered a good deal of the topics that are now being covered in the English course, albeit in different words.

So, for example, the current section of the English course is about learning English as a foreign language. I’ve covered learning Spanish as a foreign language (ie how to learn it as a foreign language rather than just learning it as a foreign language) already and although there are obviously differences in how English is learnt as a foreign language, it feels very much as a repeat of the Spanish segment.

Similarly, there was a section of the course on marketing English. I’ve already done that in the MBA.

Anyway, net effect of that repetition is that it looks likely that I’ll have completed the course by the end of June rather than the official end-date of September.