What I Study in Vienna: Transkulturelle Kommunikation

I’ve received a few e-mails from readers over the past few months asking for more information about what exactly the program is that I study, what the atmosphere of the University of Vienna is like, and just generally wanting to know what it’s really like to study here. So even though I have admittedly not been the model student in the past few semesters (I’m working on it!) I thought I’d write a post sharing what knowledge I have acquired about studying in Vienna as a foreign student.

I study Transkulturelle Kommunikation (Transcultural Communication) with the working languages of English, German and Spanish. As a student of Transkulturelle Kommunikation you get to choose three working languages, your “A, B and C” languages. If your A-language (native language) is not German, you must select German as your “B” language, and have the choice of the following languages for your “C” language:

Serbo-Croatian
English
French
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Spanish
Czech
Hungarian

The program is a bachelor program and lasts for 6 semesters.The majority of my lectures are in German. I have had two lectures in English so far (“Global English and International Communication” and “Kultur und Kommunikation: Englisch”) I have also had a few lectures in Spanish.

I had learned German for a few years before starting to study here, and so far I haven’t had any major problems following my lectures (except on the days where my head feels particularly heavy and I start to drift off, but I had that problem when I studied in English too!)

My classes are currently a mixture of grammar classes relevant to each of my three working languages, culture classes that are all currently focusing on the history of some of the countries where my three languages are spoken, and a few classes dealing with “transcultural communication” itself.

The students’ council has a very informative website with pretty much all of the information you could ever want about the program (mostly in German).

If you have any more questions, leave me a comment and I’d be glad to help out if I can, but for now I need to sleep so that I can be at work for 6:15am! The Viennese need their coffee!