Even when classes break for lunch Saturday afternoon there’s no break in the language. The groups have lunch together in the language they’re learning. Then they return to class and keep on going.
On Saturday at dusk some of the students begin to report phenomena resembling out of body experiences. Urbanski jokes, “Only when this constant bombardment collapses your resistance can the new language come surging in like an angry sea through a broken dike.”
Even the students who were suggesting wine and talk the night before hasten to bed in order to meet the dawn on Sunday, the final day. Sessions continue clear up to a late lunch, after which there’s a “graduation” exercise, whereupon everybody vows to return at the next opportunity for immersion in the next highest level of their language.
Dr. Urbanski wants his immersion students to have fun. Walk down the corridors during teaching hours (or follow a group on a “language hike” through the mountains around New Paltz) and you’ll hear laughter, clapping, singing, and what sound like pep rallies in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, and the other languages of the weekend.
“Why make students suffer unnecessarily?” Urbanski asks. “Learning a language doesn’t have to bring pain and suffering. We believe in providing a nonthreatening environment in which students are rewarded for their progress but not punished for their errors.” An immersion graduate added, “The festival spirit wakes us up, keeps us sharp, lubricates the flow of new words, and anesthetises us against the pain of grammar.”
Urbanski never promises you can go straight from a weekend of foreign language immersion to a booth at the United Nations and simultaneously interpret a foreign minister’s address. What immersion promises is a more than elementary introduction to the language, a good grounding in its words and melodies, the ability to “defend” yourself in that language without help, and a solid base from which you can grow, either through self study or more courses. No claim is made that students will be fluent by the end of one immersion weekend. “We teach linguistic survival,” says Urbanski. “After a few immersion weekends our students can manage in the language.”
The New Paltz Language Immersion Institute has grown from immersion weekends on campus to weekends at the nearby Mohonk Mountain House resort and in Manhattan. A programme is now under way in Washington, D.C. Anyone desiring information – no qualifications necessary – may call the New Paltz Language Immersion Institute at 1-800-LANGUAGE.
Tuition for the weekend ranges from $175 to $250, depending on location. The two week summer programme at the New Paltz campus costs $400.
In the words of one satisfied institute graduate, “I learned enough to continue to learn more!”

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