Trip Review: Manchester University MFL Taster Day

Chris Prince / 20 January 2017 / Categories: News

On Friday 13th January 2017, a group of Year 9 students attended a Manchester University trip to uncover the importance of why languages are essential to study at GCSE.

The day began with a lecture on why taking a languages GCSE is important and what you can achieve by taking languages GCSE.

A few statistics that we discovered were:

Ø  85% of employers prefer people who can speak a foreign language to work with them.

Ø  Only 6% of the world’s population speak English as their mother tongue (home language).

Ø   English is the 3rd ranking language with 365 million native speakers, with 1^st rank in most native speakers being Mandarin (Chinese).

We then did paper folding, where we made frogs out of paper. This activity originates from China.

Later, we did an Italian session where we were taught the basics of Italian- particularly greetings and how to pronounce them. We also learnt the hand signs of the numbers which the citizens use to show their expressions.

Ci= chi sound    Ce= che sound   Chi= key sound

So if we were to say “Chi se ne frega!” (meaning “Who cares?”) you would pronounce it as “Key se na frei-ga.” The Italians also have masculine and feminine and has cognates, e.g. student (masculine) and studentessa (feminine) which mean student.

We had our lunch break then proceeded to doing a Mandarin (Chinese) lesson, where we learnt the origin of the panda (Szechuan) and the numbers in Chinese and a few words such as introducing ourselves.

yī / 一one    èr / 二 two    sān / 三 three    sì / 四 four    wǔ / 五 five  

 liù / 六 six    qī / 七 seven     bā / 八eight     jiǔ / 九 nine      shí / 十 ten

Ni hao, wo jiao… [name] meaning Hello, my name is [name] in mandarin.

After this session, we did belly dancing where we were taught step-by-step how to dance with scarves.

We wrapped the day up with a flight of stairs to the next building into the lecture theatre for an evaluation of our sessions. Once we left the building, we waited for the mini-bus to get us back to school.

In all, we definitely enjoyed the day and hope the school continues to make trips like this! 5 out of 5 stars!

Rachel and Sofia, Year 9 Students