I can’t believe I’ve been away from my blog for going on three months. Actually, I can believe it as I was thinking about stopping blogging. Having found other learners online to work with, it seemed sensible to focus on learning itself and collaboration with other learners, on publishing links to resources and so on rather than on sharing my personal reflections on my learning with readers on the internet as a whole, many of whom stumble across my blog by accident and are, in fact, looking for something else. However, the news that SOAS Language Centre will not offer Bengali at any level at all this year has awakened me from my ‘blog weary apathy’. If we don’t have formal routes open to us then these informal routes are vital for learners of Bangla to find each other, share resources and keep motivated.
This year King’s College London has offered both Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 starts soon – on 29th September – and only 2 places remain. The course will be offered on a Monday night from 6.00 p.m to 7.30 p.m. Level 2 still has 13 places available, which might suggest it will end up not running. It is due to start on the same day, 29th September at 7.30 p.m.
SOAS is not offering any Bangla in its Language Centre and instead now offers beginners level French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Surely any further education college in this country can do that (at many more levels than just beginners and probably better). There is a wealth of written material for learners of French, it’s closer to English than Bangla is, France is on our doorstep (in the South of England anyway), and our schools routinely teach French. Specialist institutions in capital cities should aim to offer more that what learners throughout the country can find on their doorstep. My experiences of studying a diploma in French at the University of Brighton were fantastic; I cannot recommend their courses more highly. We had a native French speaker and a bilingual French speaker whose mother was French. They were both experienced teachers within Higher Education and at that time, the course I did was offered within University of Brighton Business School. But it was expansive as well as focused, fun as well as functional and enabling in many ways, opening up more literature to us, for example, by improving our four skills. University of Brighton has no particular responsibility to offer Bangla – it does what it should be doing, and it does it well – but SOAS does.
My Bangla Diary আমার বাংলা ডাইরি 