There’s one weekend out of the year that never fails to amaze, for reasons both frustrating and exhilarating—immersion weekend. Each year at the beginning of winter term, students and professors from the German, French, Japanese, and Russian departments (and sometimes Chinese, Spanish, and more!) all pile into buses and head two hours north of Lawrence, to Björklunden, the Norwegian-style lodge in Door County, right on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The location is, of course, beautiful. The evergreen trees are particularly stunning against the snow, and in the winter it’s absolutely silent outside because the lake has frozen over. Björklunden offers a perfect retreat from the busy Lawrence routine. A lot of groups that go there take advantage of all the readily-available nature—I had a great time in the fall with the ASL club, when we took a walk in the woods and didn’t speak once.
But for immersion weekend, the focus tends to be indoors. Each group takes a language pledge: its members will not speak English from when they arrive on Friday night to when they get on the bus back to Appleton on Sunday afternoon. This promise requires a lot of dedication—it’s not always easy to communicate in a language you’re still in the middle of learning, especially if you’re surrounded by a bunch of your classmates all trying to do the same thing. If you know more than one language, you might be in luck; there’s a lot of inter-group mingling, and some pretty funny trilingual jokes.
For each group, the weekend is divided mostly between free time and structured language-learning activities—usually games, but sometimes group work for certain courses. Professors come too, so there’s always someone to ask if you get stuck or forget a word. But the biggest part of the trip is Cabaret (or as we call it in the German department, Kabarett), the section of Saturday evening where each group performs for the others. In the past, departments have put together skits, songs, and informative lessons, all in their respective languages, for the audience’s amusement. All the preparation for Cabaret is done during the same weekend, however, so while it is an exercise in creativity, it’s also a test of working under pressure, which usually results in some pretty fantastic productions!
This year the French department made fun of their language by creating a mock classroom, complete with bored students and a “teacher” who was excessively picky about pronunciation, but made absolutely no sense at all. At the end of their skit, the group led a conga line around the whole room. The German department sang a call-and-response song about a mishap on a chicken farm and also joked about their language—volunteers were called to the front of the room and asked to try their hand at reading out words that grew progressively longer (the final one being “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz”). From the Japanese group—the smallest, as only 3 students could fit the weekend into their schedule—we heard a traditional ghost story, read aloud and accompanied by illustrations through a PowerPoint presentation, delivered with the lights turned off. And finally, the Russian department, who are almost always the largest group in attendance, acted out a folk tale about a runaway dumpling—complete with props and live music.
After Cabaret, there is a dance party, but this year there were also several games of Mafia played by members of all groups (in English). To me, although this was technically a breach of the language pledge, it was also one of the best moments in the whole weekend: we had all created something unique, and now we could relax, spend time with new friends, and learn some things we never thought to ask. Because that’s the magic of immersion weekend—each group is very different, and for more than 24 hours we don’t even speak the same language, but we’re all united by choosing to take on the challenge of the weekend, and by the time Cabaret is over, we’ve all recognized that we have that in common. Being back on campus now, with my second immersion weekend behind me, I’m seeing familiar faces everywhere, and I can’t wait to embrace the adventure again next year!
(Photo by Luke Payne)