In the Fall of 2025, our German 1 students welcomed Pauline Segur — a Teaching Assistant and live-in advisor from the French Department — for an intercultural conversation on drink culture in Germany and France.
"The students asked me questions about French culture in German, and thanks to Google Translate, we managed to chat almost without a language barrier! We did get some hilarious translations along the way!" says Pauline.
To prepare, students first worked in pairs with pen and paper to create their own interview questions in German, without using any technology. Once their questions were ready, they used AI translation tools to communicate from German to French and vice versa, as no English is being used in our immersive language classes.
Students spoke their German questions into a microphone, and Google Translate instantly rendered them into French on screen. Pauline read the French translation aloud and responded in French. The students then watched her answer appear back in German through the same translation tool — and the student who had asked the original question read the German version of Pauline's response aloud to the class.
Because the clarity of each translation depended on accurate writing and pronunciation, students had to pay close attention to form and detail throughout the process of creating questions and speaking them out aloud. They found it humorous when some sentences got "lost in translation" due to pronunciation slips or grammatical errors, and they experienced a real sense of success when we corrected their questions together and tried again.
We also learned a lot of curious things about German and French drink production and preferences — for example, that Germans drink more beer than the French, but France actually has more craft beer breweries than Germany. We also discovered that alcohol consumption among today's French and German youth, Generation Z, has dropped significantly, likely due to greater awareness of the health risks associated with drinking.
This creative communication sequence bridged French and German culture, turning a traditional pen-and-paper exercise into a live intercultural conversation that connected language form, sound, and cultural meaning. The exercise also brought home the idea that AI tools, by themselves, without human thought, interpretation, and revision, will often yield imperfect or imprecise results — reinforcing that learning a language cannot be replaced entirely by technology.
"Huge thanks to Prof. Ostrau for organizing this creative class," says Pauline Segur.
Dank dir / Grâce à toi, Pauline.
