Working collaboratively with others: Creativity, Service

As part of my summer holiday plans I wanted to participate in an intensive German course to help my German.  I went out and had interviews at a couple of different German schools to try and find a match for me. In the end I choose the German school I choose because of the opportunity the gave to outside of their class time meet with someone interested in learning your mother tongue and whose mother tongue is the language you are studying. My Language buddy was George, George was German and was looking to improve his German skills. We met every other day for two weeks just for an hour to talk in English and German. At first I was very embarrassed speaking in German as I found he had to correct me a lot and I had to look up words I didn’t know often. However after a while I really felt more comfortable. After half an hour of speaking German it was my turn to help George with his English. I came to our meetings with vocabulary lists and tongue twisters to help his pronunciation. It took a couple of days to really get into the 30-minute discussions but each one became easier. After a couple of sessions we went over some of the class work we were finding difficulty with and exchange our favourite books in our native language for each other to read. In the first week except for my confidence I didn’t see that much difference in my German proficiency. It also became increasingly difficult to meet as I had lots of plans and George was working. We ended up missing one or two meetings but after two weeks I think we had both made a difference in each other’s language abilities. It was really rewarding to help George while improving my German skills.