Introduction to Iida's weekly program

It's already June and it feels a bit like my time in Leipzig is coming to an end. It's still about exactly two months now til I'm back in Finland - and as time goes fast, I'm making lists of things I still want to do here and urging people who want to visit me to book their weekends now.

The summer semester at the university is from the beginning of April til the end of July. As a Finn I find it a bit crazy to go to school in the summer time, but no-can-do. Half of the semester it thus gone already and I realized I haven't reported about my studies here at all. So here it comes: a description of Iida's week at the university.

Mondays I only have one lesson, 17-18.30 in the evening, and it is the most useless of my courses. It's a German conversation cource organized by the institute that organized also our orientation coursein March. I thought I want to concentrate on my German at least a bit and took the advanced level conversation cource where we all on our turn have to give a little lecture and lead the conversation after that. I took it, although I had to pay 25 euros for it - for the Erasmus students it's for free, but for me with a bilateral exchange contract it costs. I was really pissed off about that, but decided to do it anyway.

And it was a mistake. This is the dilemma of paying for your studies: if you are not satisfied, do they give your money back? I decided I don't even try to get my money back, as it most likely wouldn't be possible and I'm scared of the Gertman bureaucracy. There were too many people registered for this cource so they created a new group and gave it to a teacher with no experiance with this level cources. Well, she talks most of the time, although it is supposed to be a conversation cource, and keeps repeating self-evident stuff about how to make a talk in front of the class. Until now I have learned maybe 3 new German words and well, I get 3 ECT points for the cource so I guess it's worth it? I will have my own lecture in a couple of weeks and will talk about African Studies as a subject at the university.

Tuesday it gets a bit more interesting. First I have the first part of the lecture module called Afrian economics. This Tuesday's seminar is called "Africa in Globalisation" and there we concentrate in themes like agriculture, brain drain, remittances, Africa-China relationships and other relevant themes for the African economic performance. That's quite interesting. The second seminar on African economics on Wednesday, called Africa's challenges, is a bit more demanding. There we talk about quite theoretical economics stuff - I'm happy that the most people at the cource, like me, have very limited understanding of economc theories. Well, now I'm familiar with concepts like Dutch Disease and Resource cource and I have learned A LOT. These economic seminars are in English as they are also attended by international global studies students. The German students complain about this a lot, as it's really hard to understand the economic vocabularity in a foreign language. Well, for me even more fun.. After an explanation in Englisch AND in Germany i mostly get the point.

For these seminars I have to - or am allowed to, for free - attend a huge conference on African studies which is taking place here in Leipzig this weekend. It has been a huge topic the whole spring and tomorrow it's finally happening. I'm quite excited, there are very many interesting lectures and I'm going to spend there at least most of my Friday and Saturday.

But back to Tuesday. After economics I jump to African language history. This seminar is really tiny with only 4 participants. In the first lecture we were only two, Manuel and me, an I'm kind of happy in the end we are at least four... The African Studies department in Leipzig is famous for concentrating more on social studies and economics so not so many people are interested in the linguistic issues.
There are couple of people who are attending almost all the seminars I am and as the groups are small, I get to know people. In general the atmosphere at the African Studies department is really friendly and relaxed.

Language history is sometimes a bit boring, but I learn a lot. It's also a part of a lecture module, the other part of this module is on Thursdays and it's about language contact in Africa. These lectures are both held by very friendly but a bit chaotic Herr Geider. I'm going to combine my German studies, knowledge of Dutch and Africa by writing a long essay in the end about the history of and influence of language contact on the only Germanic language in Africa, afrikaans.

Tuesday and Wednesday evenings I'm concentrating on German literature. Tuesdays T'm attending a semianr called historical stories/novels, where we read some long stories with a historical theme and analyze them. On Wednesday we analyze German nature poetry and that I find more interesting than the historical stories. Both of these seminars are full of young freshemen and are quite big so it's not easy to get to know people.

My Wednesday starts with a very interesting lecture on African sociolinguistics by the professor on African Studies, who is going to retire after this semester. Herr Wolff is married with a Finn and speaks Finnish, which is a quite hilarious coincidence. The Wednesday lecture called "Globalisation vs. Indigenisation? The language issue in Africa" is accompanied by the Thursday morning seminar on the same subject. On Thursday is also another lecture by Herr Wollf about the same subject. I'm really interested in these sociolinguistic issues in Africa and have finally found a forum to discuss the phenomena I encountered back in the days in Kenya. Sheng, the multilingual identity of people and the semilingual competence of people in Nairobi now have more explanations. And the more I study the area, the more I want to go back to Eastern Africa and really learn how to speak Swahili.

Thursday afternoon I still have one lecture I haven't mentioned yet. It's about contemporary African litarature and also other comtemporary art forms in Africa. And it's also extremely interesting! - Well, in general, everything I study here is extremely interesting and I'm able to combine many areas of interest. There could be even more interesting lectures, like in the area of cultural science or some Dutch or more German literature... But my days are quite full, as you can see. Tuesdays 11-15 and 17-19 and after that salsa lesson, wednesdays from 8.20-13 and 17-19, Thursdays without a break 9-17. Yes, I forgot: Wednesday morning, damn early, I have a lesson on German phonetics. This is quite a harmless little cource, I just have to go there for 45 minutes to pronounce German correctly and practice on my own once week in language lab. That's actually quite fun and I have learded a lot!

I have a presentation almost every week - or like next week, three a week. But that means I don't have any exams in the end - or only one. I have a couple of essays I have to write but I'll manage to work load. I'll get loads of ECTs for Kela and am quite happy about that, as it means I don't have to stress about that in the fall.

This blog entry is already about as long as my school days... Well, the days and the weeks pass fast as I have my hands full the whole time. Now I'm off to the gym - bis später!