Souhaitez-vous mejorar en idiomas? – Jetzt geht’s los!
Would you like to brush up on your German, French or Spanish? Registration for Aarhus University's free language courses for students is now open. The deadline for applications is 18 January.
Language courses for students
The courses are for full-time students at AU and take place in parallel with their studies.
In the coming semester, all courses will take place in Aarhus.
For the basic and intermediate level courses, applicants must complete an online placement test, which is used to place applicants in the course that best suits their current language level.
The courses are free, but there is a limited number of places. The deadline for applications is 18 January.
You grind through one English text after another in the syllabus, and maybe you even struggle to find the Danish words for English terms. But can you formulate a formal email in French? Give a professional presentation in German or conduct a meeting in Spanish?
If you hesitate in answering the above, and German cases or French irregular verbs are about as forgotten as your graduation hat, you now have the opportunity to apply for Aarhus University's free language courses for full-time students.
This coming semester, AU will offer courses in German, French and Spanish at basic and intermediate levels. German is also offered as a beginner's language. In the course description, AU writes that the courses allow you to "expand your vocabulary, become more familiar with oral and written conversations and become aware of cultural differences between Denmark and other countries".
In January, Omnibus spoke with one of the students who has taken advantage of the offer of free language courses. Hekmatullah Akbari, who was then studying law in his sixth semester and also had a student job at the law firm Plesner in Copenhagen. Here, he noticed that German parties were involved in most of the agreements he was involved in.
"It’s my experience that it means a lot to the German parties that you know just a little German, and that knowing German can therefore provide the opportunity to work on some exciting agreements or to work in Brussels, where I have the impression that it’s also an advantage to know French or German," Hekmatullah Akbari told Omnibus.
This motivated him to apply for AU's German course at an intermediate level – he has participated in both a summer course during the summer holidays and an online language course alongside his studies. Hekmatullah Akbari studied German at B level in upper secondary school, and even though he had his last German class back in 2019, it hasn't been as difficult as feared to brush up on German grammar.
“I experienced that the language course opened a door to passive knowledge that was waiting to be used,” he says, but emphasises that the language course has been a priority that has demanded something of him.
January 18 is the deadline for applying to AU's language courses in the spring semester.
The courses take place in Aarhus in the afternoon, spread over 10-11 teaching weeks, with two hours of teaching per week. In addition, there are also two weekend workshops of four hours each. The courses do not provide ECTS, but when you have completed the course, you will receive a course certificate, which cannot be equated with the language certifications that are used, for example, for exchange purposes.
This text is machine translated and post-edited by Lisa Enevoldsen.