The approaching summer holidays often signal the end of regular teaching in company courses. Staff and teachers take holidays and instead of cancelling lessons repeatedly, they prefer to resume the course in September.
However logical this is from an organisational point of view, what it often inevitably leads to is that hard-earned knowledge is reliably washed away by memories of the sea and summer barbecues. Taking a break from language for a few months is not good for the brain. It’s roughly the same as running three times a week for nine months, eating healthily and then taking a break from running for three months and eating fast food. Getting back into shape will then be very difficult and mostly demotivating, just like starting from scratch.
So how do you avoid starting from scratch after the summer?
First of all, try to convince your colleagues in HR that you want to continue in the summer. Many companies don’t allow this option, but in the current era of two percent unemployment, employees have a major say in benefits, and if you can make a good case for the importance of continuity, you may be able to convince the company. After all, it is better to cancel a few lessons than to lose touch with the language altogether. If you cancelled some lessons over the year, summer is also the perfect time to make up for them. Summer is also a time when companies often book various intensive courses in a professionally focused language or courses focused on softskills.
If you do not have the opportunity to continue your corporate training, develop a system of self-study. For some students, summer is an opportunity to finally read a book or watch a series in peace. If you do so in a foreign language, you kill two birds with one stone. If you desire a more organized option, try e-learning. Just sit down to do it for 15 minutes a day and that’s all.
And even if you are not planning to travel abroad over the summer, you can still be more adventurous with the language at home. Try planning a regular get-together over a beer with a bunch of enthusiasts, where you have a conversation exclusively in the foreign language. If you enjoy writing, try, for example, postcrossing, a project in which users send postcards from all over the world.
Mgr. Tereza Najberková, Language School Methodologist