Choose your year abroad carefully: study, teach or work?

The unlucky French teaching assistant posted to my school to help drag us through GCSE French was subjected to a volley of questions every lesson from the enthusiastic class, all of which were: “Sir! Sir! Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?”

The poor bespectacled young man would turn bright red in embarrassment before this army of teenage girls who, bless them, only wanted to learn. If this sounds like your idea of hell, the teaching option is probably not for you – although in my experience French teenagers aren’t quite as bad, they just like Nirvana a bit too much. Standing up in front of a class can be daunting, especially if you haven’t prepared your lessons well. On the other hand, when you’re blessed with a class who actually wants to learn, teaching can be a joy.

Going to a foreign university is a better way to meet people your own age though, and also a better way to avoid doing any work whatsoever. A friend of mine attended university in Siena, and I use the word ‘attended’ very loosely, because you could count on one hand the number of times she went anywhere near the university. But if you’re a self-motivated worker and truly want to learn more on your abroad than what the cheapest price you can pay for a bottle of local plonk is, university is an option worth considering.

Alternatively, if you’re keen to throw yourself head first into the society of your adopted country, getting a job would do wonders for your linguistic development. Opting for a nine-to-five will mean missing out on some of the perks (lie-ins, long lazy lunches...) but is a great way of getting a taster of real life abroad.

Don’t settle for a second-rate destination

If you’ve read A Year in Provence (and my advice is don’t), you may harbour a romantic ideal that won’t match the reality. I ticked the box labelled Provence, hoping for Aix, and ended up in a place called Carpentras, famed only as a Front National stronghold.

It was also a town that seemed to lack entirely the 18-30 demographic, consequently with very little for a 21-year-old to do. Thanks to the solitude, I had found myself by the end of the first week and, by the second, realised that I didn’t much enjoy spending time with the self I had found.

If you end up in a town like this, don’t feel obliged to stick it out. If there is a livelier place nearby, it’s best to decamp and commute to the town where you’re teaching or working. When I bid au revoir to one teacher at my school, she marvelled: “You're the only foreign student who’s stuck out the full six and a half months. Every other assistant sent here got depressed and left.” I wished I’d done the same.

Avoid spending all your time with English speakers

There are good reasons for avoiding Brits abroad when on a normal holiday: one of them is socks and sandals, another is their idea that speaking the lingo means speaking English but just several decibels higher. Obviously more sophistication can be expected from your fellow year abroad students, but it’s still best to avoid spending too much time in their company if you actually want to improve your speaking skills.

Track down natives, befriend them – by force if necessary – and then insist that they don’t speak a word of English to you. A famously great way to become fluent is to nab yourself a native boyfriend or girlfriend. They’re not hard to come by – remember, you’ll be a foreigner, and will therefore sound sexy and exotic to them no matter how much you massacre their language in your obtrusive English accent.

Do some work

Expect to have a lot of spare time on your hands, and expect to be driven bonkers by the game shows and chat shows on television after you’ve watched your first 16,000. Let’s be honest: while British daytime TV is generally as appetising as a plate of over-boiled cuisine, foreign TV tends to be several degrees worse. Think Countdown, but with rules you, and perhaps even the contestants themselves, don’t understand.

Studying may be the last thing on your mind when you jet off to warmer climes, but it is worth making use of the gaping holes in your diary to get some extra reading done while you’re away. Your final year will seem a dim and distant dot on the horizon at this point, but when you get there you’ll be grateful for any swotting you did in your otherwise hedonistic third year.

Use your whole year

The rules on whether students studying two languages must spend time in both countries vary from university to university. But if you have a choice, do divide your year between the two. Listening to Manu Chao, for example, really isn’t a substitute for going abroad, where you will absorb more than just Mi Gustas Tu.

If you’re only learning one language, you may have a few spare months between officially finishing your year abroad and returning to university for your fourth year. Make the most of this time to do something useful and/or interesting. That is, avoid watching daytime TV at your parents’ house for the best part of the summer, even if it is Big Brother season. (Especially if it is Big Brother season, in fact.)

When you graduate and become a real person with a real job, you’ll long for those days when you could hitchhike to Mexico on a whim and spend weeks rescuing distressed turtles washed up on white sandy beaches - or something. Go save those turtles while you still have the chance.

– Have you been on a year abroad? Share your thoughts and advice below.

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