World Without Walls

By John Skow

A few miles away, near Bemidji, Minnesota's Route 71 passes without fuss over a small and not yet imposing stream, the Mississippi. Here at Turtle River Lake, a visitor drapes a bandanna over his head to make the mosquitoes work for their breakfast and watches ducklings learn to navigate. Just out of view, a loon raises its daft, sad cry. Precisely the moment for a morning swim, but no, a sign at the beach warns, DER STRAND IST GESCHLOSSEN!

Was gibt's hier? Up the hill, through a stand of pines and birches, the onlooker finds a Bavarian train station, correctly labeled BAHNHOF. Not far from there is a GASTHAUS whose stucco and half-timber construction would look echt in Innsbruck. And between them, in the gathering place called the Marktplatz, a group of what are unmistakably American teenagers is shouting at a tall fellow a few years older, whose hair is pulled back in a ponytail. "Was tust du?" (What are you doing?), the kids demand. "Ich lese," the tall one calls back. (I'm reading.) From behind a large ornamental fountain comes an ominous roll of thunder and the stern voice of a Germanic goddess. "Aber was liest du?" (But what are you reading?) "Die SPORTS ILLUSTRATED swimsuit issue?" The teenagers hoot at this idea. "Nein, nein," the tall chap protests. "Ein ganz normales Buch." (Just a normal book.) He begs the teenagers to confirm this. "Ja, ja, stimmt, er ist O.K.!" (Yes, that's right, he's O.K.!), they yell out. Now the goddess, a young language instructor named Mucki, crawls out from behind the fountain with the bass drum she has been using for her thunder. Mucki and Ulli, the tall fellow, then dismiss the beginners' class at Waldsee, one of 10 extraordinary summer language villages run by Minnesota's Concordia College.

Nearby on Turtle River Lake are Lac du Bois, a French camp -- the name means Lake of the Woods, as does Waldsee -- and the Norwegian Skogfjorden (Wooded Fjord). The Concordia Language Villages summer program started in 1961, and these three older settlements have their own buildings in authentic architectural styles. Lac du Bois is convincingly French Provincial, and Skogfjorden is more Norwegian than Norway, with an old stave church and a wattle-walled Viking house. Newer camps thrive without stage-set architecture. The Spanish El Lago del Bosque (Lake of the Woods, of course) does very nicely, gracias, in a rented Bible camp on the far side of Bemidji, and a three-year-old, highly popular Japanese village, Mor-No-Ike, has taken root in a ski resort near Hibbing. Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Russian, Chinese and two more French camps are dotted about the state. Total enrollment this summer will approach 5,000.

Students pass through customs gates as they arrive at the camps, change dollars into marks or francs or kroner, and receive new identities. Jennifer becomes "Marie" or "Traudl" or "Helga"; Jack is reborn as "Juan" or "Bjorn." This simple bit of pretending is remarkably effective. Jennifer may be too self-conscious to try to speak German, but "Traudl" chatters away without embarrassment. In the time that follows -- one week for 7- to 10-year- olds, two weeks for noncredit high schoolers and four weeks of rigorous instruction for high school credit students -- total immersion is the ideal. The new language becomes the sea the student swims in, and it is impossible not to get wet.

Methods are eclectic at the Concordia villages, but real back-and-forth conversation is the first goal. Credit students learn their case endings and irregular verbs, but clowning around, even at the advanced level, keeps scholars fresh and interested. Students stage ridiculous dining-hall skits in their new languages and prove that you can't be self-conscious speaking Spanish while dressed like half an elephant. Everyone sings almost without stop: nonsense songs; protest songs; "rocken roll," as they say in Norway; and anthems celebrating a "world without walls," which has been the villages' global theme since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Songs not only are fun but also teach word patterns that are hard to forget.

Staff members are a good mix of native speakers and young American graduate students. Campers come from all over, for all reasons. "Chrystelle" at Lac du Bois is Pouneh Yasai, 16, from Iran by way of Milwaukee, who wants to be able to talk with her French cousins and plans to study international law or medicine at Georgetown. "Adina," who is Amy Macfarlane, 16, of Baldwin, Wis., is in her third year of credit study at Waldsee and hopes to do research on the effects of two world wars on German culture. Like most students, it seems, she wants to return to language camp as a counselor.

At Skogfjorden, 18-year-old "Torgeir," Daniel Howland from Bloomington, Minn., says, "I tried to hate it" when his parents sent him here at 14. He loved it, paid his own way with scholarship help for two more years, and today speaks fluent Norwegian as one of the teachers. He is speaking with difficulty just now because a beginning class has covered him with paper tags: TENNER on his teeth, EN MUNN on his mouth, EN NESE on his nose and so on. He is a huge, powerfully built youth, amiably playing the gawk for his adoring students. But he is serious as he tells his plans: St. Olaf College in the fall and eventually teaching English and Norwegian in Norway. "I have so much fun with teaching," he says, absently removing HODE from the top of his head. A middle-aged visitor, who remembers when high schoolers in the U.S. "took" language the way you take bad-tasting medicine, shakes his own hode ruefully and marvels.