To wish there were language classes for people with no literary skills (and to feel really sorry for school kids)

[toomuchtooold]

I've emigrated, I'm back in bloody German classes, me and all my midlife emigrant classmates have to write a thing describing a cultural experience we've been to recently. I don't have any powers of imagination to describe stuff, and anyway I've not been to any cultural experiences recently i.e. in the last 3 years since my kids were born, at least not unless you count soft play as a cultural experience. Is it just me or does everyone hate these things? Teach me things like how to rearrange a parcel delivery over the phone or write a job application, or just give me stuff to translate!

DuoLingo?

you could try LiveMocha with their peer to peer thing?

Can't you write about Karneval or the Christmas markets? They're cultural!

I'm tied into the classes because they come with childcare - starting to think I would have better just paid for a couple of days in nursery for the kids and got my old textbooks out! Oh well, I am going to write about the last full film I saw at the cinema (2 years ago - I did try to go in 2014 when I had a day off work and the kids were in nursery but then one of them got a temperature and I got called back to pick them up...)

But you've emigrated. EVERYTHING is a cultural experience. Turn the assignment on its head and talk about buying a ticket for public transport as an endeavour in culture clash (i'm speaking as an expat myself)

Shopping is a cultural experience. Write about the differences in cultures. Markets, speciality shops etc

You know you don't have to tell the truth don't you?

Just move things from the distant past and put them into the near past.

e.g. cultural event - visiting Millennium Dome; recent film Top Gun
(well, maybe not that old)

(I've got very good at making things up to give DD ideas for her MFL controlled assessments).

Any walk down the street is new cultural experience, architecture, parks, how people dress etc. Just look around.

Surely cultural experience is the broadest possible term they could have used, as PP have said -- any tv/radio show, trip to a restaurant or shop, chat with a neighbour etc can be a cultural experience. The point is to get you to use more abstract vocabulary and more complex grammatical structures than the ones you need for basic tasks like arranging parcel delivery etc.

I have a language tutor through italki - many tutors offer very reasonable prices. Also, the app duolingo is surprisingly (to me) good.