Foreign Students Gather to Learn the Language, Have Fun : Education: Downtown office buildings house schools that are a mecca for students of English from around the world.

In an inconspicuous corner of downtown is a gathering of nations.

Matches strike. Cigarettes light. The drags are leisurely, but talk doesn’t always come easily.

“San Diego is a very exhausted place,” said Roy Mueller, from Zurich, Switzerland, a 22-year-old bank trainee. “Yes. It’s a great city.”

What are you talking about?

“The atmosphere here. You are always getting exhausted from so many parties.”

Ah.

On the sidewalk near a C Street trolley stop scores of young people from around the world take time off from English classes to share a cigarette, a cup of joe or even a conversation. They are among the hundreds of international college students and professionals enrolled at language schools downtown.

The schools are clustered within a mile radius of each other, central to the rest of the city and accessible by bus lines reaching all parts of the county.

Between periods, every 50 minutes like clockwork, a loose group forms in front of the ELS Language Center on C Street near 7th Avenue. Students stretch, snack and smoke their way to familiarity.

Across the street is the Language Institute for English; around the block on Broadway is Converse International School of Languages; on Broadway near Front Street is the College of English Language; on Fifth Avenue and slightly north is Language Studies International.

Scattered throughout the rest of the city are at least a dozen other programs, including two at UC San Diego Extension and San Diego State University, that teach English to thousands of foreigners each year.

According to Mueller, San Diego is the most popular destination for Swiss looking for a place to study and take a vacation at the same time.

“From Switzerland, it’s easier to just go to England if you are just interested in language,” he said. “You come to San Diego to learn English and you expect to have fun.”

Mueller enjoys the sense of freedom he has here, where young people are “easier to know” and “more spontaneous,” he said. He credits the city’s club scene for welcoming those with a language deficit. Bars make the mingling easy, he says.

Two weeks ago, he struck up a friendship with a woman at a bar in Mission Beach. Four days later he moved into her Coronado apartment. Mueller originally arranged to live with a local family, with whom he stayed for three months.

Mueller mulls a question about his new housemate: “Her name?” Then replies: “It’s Mary.”

As for Mary’s last name, Mueller digs deep into his memory banks.

Like so much forgotten vocabulary, he comes up empty: “I don’t remember her last name.”

Well, it’s only been a week and a half.

*

Eugenia Mendez is an accidental student. She came to San Diego with her mother from Guadalajara for a short visit, then stayed for the better part of a year after her mother suffered a heart attack.

Mendez is taking classes at ELS while her mother recovers.

“Before we came, I thought San Diego seemed not-so-cosmopolitan,” Mendez said. “I didn’t expect to meet people from countries all over.”

She plans to study to the highest level at ELS, then return to Guadalajara to teach mass communications, in which she holds a university degree.

Last week, Mendez sat in a conversation class, fingering the keyboard of her electronic dictionary. At turns she punched in vocabulary words, then asked for clarification when the definitions didn’t quite fit the context of the reading material.

“Minority?” she asked an instructor during a discussion on ethnic communities and the unrest in Los Angeles last spring. The teacher’s answer did not jibe.

“African, Korean, Mexican, Central American peoples,” Mendez listed with tilted head and slightly quizzical look. She tried to comprehend how the definition of minority applies to ethnic groups en masse.

“There are so many,” she said.

*

The brochures in the lobby of ELS are written in seven languages. About 120 students from 19 countries are enrolled, said Jim Scofield, director of courses at ELS. Classes are scheduled in four-week blocks, five days a week, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Thirty-six students are from Japan. Eighteen are Swiss.

In general, the summer months are the busiest of the year, Scofield said. Many of the language students are professionals assigned by foreign companies. A few are tourists with time to spare.

Teacher Phil Sasso, 36, lived in Ulm, Germany; Tokyo, and Dornack, Switzerland, before coming to ELS in 1987. While abroad he learned the impression Southern California has on people from different countries.

Sasso said San Diego draws so many foreign students because it offers a taste of the lifestyle behind the mythology that is Southern California. And it does so without overwhelming, as Los Angeles is said to do, with its urban sprawl, its dependence on freeway travel and its violence.

San Diego offers the big city amenities with less of the big city grit, Sasso said. It has more of the fabled California coastline that has not been lost to development, and perhaps most importantly, it has the weather.

“It’s a very seductive place to come to,” Sasso said.

*

Rui Okamoto wants to know what he is singing about.

He hails from Nagoya, an industrial port city in central Japan, where he sings and plays guitar in a Rockabilly band with two friends.

The power trio goes by the name Hunt Lips, he says.

Lips? Like women’s lips? a listener asks to make sure he’s heard correctly.

“Of course,” 19-year-old Okamoto says with a sly grin.

He has been studying in San Diego for four months, and his English still comes haltingly. Okamoto plans to complete the highest level of study at ELS, then apply to the University of Redlands in Redlands.

Questions in English prove somewhat daunting. The one practiced response he utters with relative ease: “I am sorry. I can’t speak English very well. Perhaps you should ask another student.”

Outside of language class, Okamoto has studiously observed San Diego culture and its people. He has learned well.

If his appearance is not quite native, it still passes for cool. His baseball cap is black. As are his Gap Pocket T-shirt, his James Dean-issue jacket and his jack boots. Only the jeans are blue.

The logo on his cap reads LABEL WHORE, a message that Okamoto only vaguely understands.

Still, dressed for adventure in a city known internationally for fun, Okamoto has yet to experience the much heralded wild life, he says.

Okamoto is too young to visit the rock clubs he wants to go to. And although he brought his guitar, he has yet to meet musicians with whom he can play.

“Night time is boring for me,” he says.

Okamoto says few words but his gaze fixes on the person he speaks with; his concentration is focused perhaps on the silent responses he imagines in his native Japanese.

The conversation struggles along until Okamoto starts in on music.

He forgoes sentence conjugation and begins listing his favorite singers and their songs.

“Yes, Eddie Cochran. Chuck Berry. Yes, John Lee Hooker. C’mon Everybody. Summertime Blues. Yes!”

How about “Johnny B. Goode?” Do you like the lead on “Johnny B. Goode?”

“Of course,” Okamoto says with a broad smile.

*

Since the 1950s, foreign languages have commonly been taught by repetition. Listen and repeat. In the last decade, the approach has stressed matching speech patterns with situations, ELS’ Scofield said. That is, the student learns the meaning of words and phrases from the situations they are spoken in.

Most modern language schools eschew vocabulary lists and grammar texts, Scofield said. Instead, teachers opt for discussion sections. Students are encouraged to take their studies outside of class.

“In the study of formal grammar, too often you focus on individual words and it’s easy to lose the thread of what’s going on,” Scofield said. “For most of our students they are not as interested in becoming scholars in the language as they are in learning to communicate. The best thing we can do for them is to simulate real life experience. Because when they walk out the door, there is a whole world out there in which they have to speak English.”

*

In some parts of Switzerland it has snowed already, says Ursula Imhasly, 24, a secretary for a telecommunications company in that nation’s capital, Bern.

She has studied at Converse International for 10 weeks. She doesn’t like to think about the weather and work at home. She already has plans to come back to San Diego next year for vacation.

Grimacing, she says she has just two more weeks before she has to go back.

“Ugh,” Imhasly groans. “Don’t remember me to that.”