Document text
Photo by Bob Pennell John Ford, a senior at Ashland High School, will spend a year in Germany as an exchange student, where his four years of Spanish probably won't do much good. Ashland senior to study in Germany 17-year-old gets a crash course in Deutch from exchange student By BILL KETTLER ASHLAND -- John Ford's four years of high-school Spanish won't help him much where he's going after graduation. Ford will need Deutsch, not Espanol, to get along when fall rolls around. Come August, he'll travel to Germany on a one-year exchange program sponsored by the German and American governments. He'll get intensive language instruction when the program begins, but right now he's getting his first lessons from a German girl who came to Ashland on the same exchange program. "It's kind of an interesting coincidence," he said, "that one (German) came here to Ashland and one (American) from Ashland will be going to Germany." Carolin Berger has spent the past nine months in Ashland through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program. The two met through mutual friends at Ashland High School, and she encouraged him to apply to the program that brought her to Southern Oregon. "I told him to go for it," she said. "You learn so much. I've learned a second language better than I ever would in school." Ashland High School doesn't offer classes in German, so Berger started teaching Ford her native tongue when he became one of just 300 young Americans selected for the program. Ford, 17, won't find out until summer where he'll be living. Berger, who hails from the industrial city of Dortmund, said she encountered some surprises when she came to Ashland, and Ford can expect a few jolts himself when he steps into a different culture. "We don't have so much space in Germany," said Berger, who marked her 17th birthday in Ashland. "Not every family has a house and a back yard. It's not very likely he will have a back yard." Germany lacks the American West's vast open spaces, she said. "It's not like here, where you can drive from Ashland to Klamath Falls and see nothing. There will always be something -- a house, a village." But mostly, she said, Ford will have to come to terms with the fact that people in Germany do things differently from people in the United States. "You can just be overwhelmed," she said, "because everything is so different." Everything, Berger learned, down to the way people sleep. Germans usually sleep under one cover (typically a feather or down comforter). When Berger arrived here, she crawled under the top blanket in her host family's guest bed. She shivered under the top blanket for several nights until her hosts showed her the top and bottom bedsheets and explained how Americans sleep between the sheets. Ford said he expects surprises, too, because his ability to speak German will be limited. But he hopes to learn fast when he's surrounded by native speakers. "I'll be kind of speechless for the first month," he said, "but in three months I'll be fine." Ford will attend the 13th year of gymnasium, the German public school for students bound for academic and professional careers. He plans to attend medical school when he returns from Germany in August 2000. He doubts he'll get homesick because he'll be immersed in a foreign culture. Berger said that's exactly what happened to her here. "There's so much going on," she said. "I'm so busy I don't have time (to miss home). I talk to my family every two weeks (on the telephone). I never feel like I'm missing out." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA