A few years ago I was a running fanatic. Before I started running I never thought that I would be able to run more than a few minutes at a time without collapsing into a heaving mess, but before I knew it I was running 5..10..15..30..45 minutes at a time and… enjoying it? Loving it? Smiling while running my heart out at -15C weather at 11:00 at night? Yep.

Like I said, this was a few years ago, and unfortunately after moving to Austria and getting lazy, it didn’t last. Since then I have had spurts of being extremely lazy (not running at all), running a little, running a lot, back to not running at all, but luckily I’ve gotten back into it and am now running regularly a few times a week for about 7km. (I got stuck in a rut in December and didn’t run at all, but luckily I haven’t lost my fitness level)

Today however was my first real cold winter run in years… and it was pretty enjoyable!

I track my progress with the Bridge to 10k iPhone app. It tracks your speed, distance, tracks your run on Google maps, gives you cues when to run, when to walk, when you have completed your workout.. pretty cool!

My next question is… will I be ready to run the Vienna City Half Marathon in April? It is 12 weeks away, and I think I will go for it. I can run 6km comfortably now.. and with a little discipline I think I could do it (21km). It would give me a concrete goal to work towards and it would be such a great feeling to actually do it.

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!

It’s a beautiful day here in Vienna – which is a huge change from how it’s been for the past few months. The winter here is honestly pretty depressing. It’s cold, grey, and just.. blah. Nothing happens! No snowstorms, no deep freezes, no snowfall up to your waist… As a Canadian I need a little action in my winter! When the weather is so constantly grey and depressing it makes it hard to do just about anything except for stay in your warm bed.

One of my absolute favourite things about Austria is the spring time weather. It’s April 3rd and it’s already t-shirt weather. From now until June it is usually constantly sunny and warm, apart from a few mandatory “April showers bring may flowers” days.

Since the sun is shining bright, it makes it a lot easier to get up and out of bed and get things done! I’m spending the few hours I have before work with a giant mug of green tea and some school work.

What about you guys, do you find the weather effects your study habits and/or your ability to simply get out of bed and get stuff done?

Well it is a bit embarrassing that my last post is from October – especially since I have absolutely no excuse as to why that is! I’ve been here, I’ve been doing lots of stuff, but just absolutely lacking ideas for posts.

I have been working at Starbucks in Vienna for a year now. That has definitely been taking up a lot of my time and I guess it’s one of the things I can use as an excuse for not writing here (lame excuse – but still!) It has been really great and given me a huge opportunity to practice my German since I speak to people all day!

I am still studying translation at the University of Vienna but it has been going very slowly because I haven’t written any of the exams for my classes yet. At the University of Vienna you have the option of taking your exams either at the end of the semester, the beginning of the next semester, or the middle of the next semester – and this makes it very easy to get lazy and keep pushing things back! During the first semester I was working full time and couldn’t always drag myself to University on my days off, so now that I am doing less hours at work I have been being a better student and may be able to take some exams from last semester and bring myself up to where I should be.

When it comes to language learning, I have been maintaining my German quite well because I live in Vienna and am confronted with it on a daily basis! My Spanish has gotten really rusty but I am confident I can bring it back up to where it was just a short while ago when I was living in Madrid if I put a little effort in.

I’m also working on a fun little side project with my friend. We have a tentative plan to take a trip to Stockholm in the summer and we are learning as much Swedish as we possibly can by then. I will be sure to make a post on exactly what we are doing and what our plans are to learn as much Swedish as possible!

What about you guys? Are any of you still out there? I’m hoping there are a few of you that haven’t given up on this blog!

Stay tuned – it’s good to be back!

Today is Nationalfeiertag here in Austria, and so I figured I’d celebrate with a big delicious Schnitzel with potato salad for dinner.

and now my stomach hurts just looking at that picture! Oh well… had to celebrate somehow!

Tomorrow I’ve got four lectures:
Grammatik im Kontext: Deutsch
Global English and International Communication
(3 hour break which I will use for studying!)
Transkulturelle Kommunikation: Probleme und Lösungsansätze
Präsentationstechniken

I am still working 32+ hours a week at Starbucks and that has been making it pretty hard to put my best into school since I am either working/exhausted/sleeping/in class… (or even sleeping in class…)
but I will be working 20 hours starting in November which should hopefully help me get my life a bit more organized/balanced and be an awesome student!

I’m going to go organize my books now so I can have a totally productive day at school tomorrow. I’ll keep you updated.

I’m sitting on a train in Kingston, Ontario waiting to head back to Toronto to meet up with my Mom to fly back to Halifax – busy day!
I’m taking advantage of the free internet on the train and the everlasting battery of my beautiful new Macbook Pro and taking the time to finalize my University schedule and to sort of figure out what I want to do with language learning.

My German is good but could be better. I work at Starbucks in Vienna and get quite a bit of practice speaking with customers but it is usually limited to “Hallo!” “Bitte schön.” “Für hier oder zum mitnehmen?” etc. and I have become incredibly bad about speaking German with my friends – it rarely happens! So when I get back to Austria I will work on that…

My Spanish has become nearly non-existant. I can still understand it really well but have a hard time speaking it. This is something I will also work on when I get back to Austria because my roommate is from Columbia!

I think I want to start speaking French again too. I just love how everything here in Canada is bilingual. I never realized how much French there is here when I was growing up, but it really is cool. So I will work on that too.

I also want to learn a completely new language. I’m thinking either Swedish or Italian. Or maybe both…

This is just sort of a rambling post because I just wanted to post something because I promised I would. Something more structured will follow soon…

Well it has certainly been awhile since my last update and I really don’t have any excuse except for a complete lack of motivation that seemed to hit me a few months ago and I am still struggling to overcome, but I am almost there! I figured I’d write at least a little post here just to get myself back into it and to really apologize for disappearing without a word! I’m still around and I this blog will be BACK (and maybe better than ever?) sooner rather than later! I wish you all the best of luck with your language learning!

Hey guys! I’m still around but since life has been all over the place for the last few weeks it’s honestly been hard to find motivation to work on my languages or to write here. But don’t worry, I’ve been getting some good ideas and should be ready for a “big comeback” sooner rather than later!

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I am a native English speaker who lives abroad, it is almost written in stone that I should be working at least part time as an English teacher. I did this a bit last year in Madrid at a really bad language school who didn’t end up giving me my last paycheck, so that kind of put me off of the idea of teaching for awhile, but now that I’m looking for a part time job, English teaching seems to be the best option. I’ve already got the most amazing part time job ever (I will write about this soon!) but unfortunately they don’t have much for me to do at the moment. Also, I probably will not be able to begin studying this semester (more on this is yet another post…) and so this has left me with a lot of free time! I would like to start working part time as an English teacher, but my question is, should I get certified first?

There are an overwhelming amount of options to get certified as an English as a Foreign Language teacher, and while it is possible to get work without one, it seems that you can get much better opportunities with one. I’m currently trying to figure out what the difference between TEFL, TESOL, and CELTA are, which one is best (if they are even different things at all!), if doing an online course is viewed equally as an in-class course, and if it is worth it at all to get one? Since I will most likely be spending the next few years here completing my degree, English teaching will probably be my best bet for a job, and since I have way too much free time now, it would be the ideal time to do a certification course.

Is it worth it? I’m looking for those out there who may have experience with this stuff. If you do, please leave a comment!

I’m not sure exactly how personal this blog is but I guess I will write a little something about where I’ve been.

My boyfriend and I have decided amicably to split up so of course that has been a pretty huge thing to deal with. I also completed and loved my first week of classes at University and gotten a really cool job at a German language school, proof reading English texts that are translated from German that they use for parallel reading activities. I check them to make sure they are well translated into English and are also as close to the original German text as possible. I’m so glad I found this job as it is the perfect side job for me right now.

So as you can guess, I will be staying in Austria although I am no longer with my boyfriend. I’m going up to Vienna tomorrow and will be looking for a room in a Wohngemeinschaft (shared apartment) next week.

I will use this time to think of some great post ideas. I hope you are all having fun learning languages!

It’s almost time… My books are on their way from Amazon.de, my computer is slowly but surely getting organized, my timetable is made (and even posted on unilang!) it’s almost time for my first week at the University of Vienna! I am really excited! My documents are still being processed but luckily I can start attending classes before I am officially registered. My first class is a Spanish grammar class on Tuesday at 8am, followed by linguistics class, a language technology class, and then a translation theory and practice class.

I think all of my classes sound really interesting (yes even grammar, but that’s mostly because I love that the class is taught in Spanish), but it’s not just the classes themselves that I am looking forward to. I am also looking forward to the following opportunities that studying abroad are going to offer:

- Daily immersion in German (unfortunately Spanish is only once a week) in situations where I will have to focus completely. I will be exposed to different accents (not all professors are Austrian), different topics, and I will have to take notes and remember things! It will be like hours of hardcore input.

- I will be able to meet a whole bunch of (German-speaking!) people in my classes who are also interested in languages! Finding people to practice with is a huge part of language learning so I will definitely be taking advantage of this.

- My homework will always be language practice since all of my classes are in a foreign language!

There’s not much I can say on any of this since I have no idea how it is going to be, but at around this time next week I will be able to offer some insight on studying abroad or attending class in a foreign language and will definitely write a blog post about it!