You know the feeling. The trip you’ve planned is months and months away until, poof, you’re leaving in just two weeks. All this time you had to prepare is suddenly gone. Now add the fact that you are trying to learn some language skills for said trip and the pressure is on. I leave for Sicily in just two weeks, and although I have been studying Italian this summer it’s never going to feel like I’ve done enough. You can’t, really, especially when studying on your own. But that is the point of a language immersion course, to plunge you into the reality of using the language to communicate. At home you can safely wrap yourself up in verb conjugation and pronoun charts, but out in the real world, in the words of Tim Gunn, you have to “make it work”. Actually for me it’s the only way I have found to get myself to use language skills. I just don’t speak other languages at home. But in-country I feel an obligation to speak the local language. I’m not just speaking the language to “practice” speaking, but for real communication. For a goal oriented person such as myself, it makes all the difference.