Saturday, November 10, 2012

They All Speak English! No, They Do not!

Well, it'll be so easy, they all speak English over there.

You have heard it so often that there seems to be no room for doubt. And, yes, it is true when we talk about the young generation in the cities, or about better educated older folks.

Where we live, however, the picture is more complicated, and you need some German to live a satisfactory life.

The dense network of adult education schools, called Volkshochschulen, is the go to facility for German language classes.
The name Volkshochschule shares the first word with that famous other "Volks"-thing, Volkswagen, so loosely and without irony, the Volkshochschule is the "people's college".

They are independent institutions, usually incoporated at the city or county level. They are financed through a complex mix of public funds, donations, grants, and course fees paid by the students.

As a foreigner looking to get residency status, you need to register with your local Ausländerbehörde (city hall or town hall will give you the details), and they will give you a paper about an "integration course".

The paper has two boxes, one indicates mandatory attendance of a language course, the other tells you that you "may" attend a class.

If you hand in that paper to your local Volkshochschule, you will pay next to nothing for hundreds of hours worth of class. In that case, you have to fulfill attendance requirements very much like for the school you finished years or decades ago.



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