Family and Junior
Language Vacations

Above: After a week or two of studying French in France, your children could get acquainted with Gallic girls and boys like these.

Archived Article
Dateline: 2001

Are children keeping you from trying a language vacation, or from visiting Europe? There may be an easy solution: Take the kids along and let them learn a new language, too--or enroll them in a European language program while you enjoy La Dolce Vita with your spouse.

I asked Christine Coté of Language Studies Abroad to send me a list of LSA language schools with junior programs. She gave me two: a list of schools where parents and children could study a language at the same time during any session, and a list of schools that had "junior only" sessions. (There's some overlap between the lists, because a few schools go to into "junior only" mode for only part of the summer or year.)

1. Simultaneous adult and junior sessions:

Austria: Vienna*.

France: Antibes*, Nice.

Italy: Treviso.

Spain: Madrid*, Marbella*, Salamanca, Sevilla.

* Same school for adults and children, but different campuses. 

2. "Junior only" sessions:

Austria: Vienna.

France: Antibes, Arcachon, Biarritz, Paris (Melun), Montpellier, Nice, Saint-Malo.

Germany: Berlin (Schmuckwitz), Munich (Grun & Passau).

Italy: Treviso, Lignano.

Spain: Madrid, Marbella, Salamanca, Sevilla.

Notes:

• Age requirements for junior programs vary from school to school; most have a lower age limit of 8 or 10, with a maximum age of 16 or 18.

• My daughter attended language camp for 10 years and loved it. (Since heading off to college, she has studied Norwegian in Norway and worked as a counselor in a Norwegian language camp.) If your children are intelligent and open to new experiences, attending a junior language program--whether abroad or at home--can be both academically worthwhile and great fun.

For more information on European lanuage schools and their junior programs, search Google for "language schools in Europe" or "language study abroad."

From Europe for Cruisers:

• Tour Europe by Ship
• European Cruise Guide 2012
• Costa: Western Mediterranean
• MSC: Eastern Mediterranean
• Holland America: Scandinavia
• More Cruising

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