During the summer, the calm, woodsy Middlebury College campus in Vermont is like many other liberal arts campuses in the summer. It is a bit more desolate than usual, but because of the nice weather, the students seem happier. However, the conversations of the passing students are hard to eavesdrop on, and greetings are cryptic: "Ciao! Come stai?"; "Hola! ¿Cómo estás?"; "Bonjour! Comment allez-vous?"; "Shalom! Mah Shlom'cha?"While school is in session at Middlebury and the campus is bustling with students, only foreign languages are taught. The college offers summer language programs in their language schools in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. For the past three years, Brandeis has also found a home in the campus famous for language immersion. The Brandeis University-Middlebury School of Hebrew, a program designed to accelerate language development, requires English speakers to sign a contract promising to push aside their native language and speak only Hebrew for seven weeks.

According to the program's website, "[The school is] dedicated to the premise that without real competency in language there can be little true cultural understanding, and to be truly effective, language teaching must provide meaningful insight and access into other cultures."

Middlebury College approached Prof. Vardit Ringvald (NEJS), the Brandeis director of the Hebrew and Arabic language program, about five years ago.

"Middlebury wanted for many years to open Hebrew, and [the college] knew about the [Brandeis Hebrew Language Summer Insitute]," Ringvald says.

The Brandeis Hebrew Language Summer Institute is a four-week Hebrew learning program, still in existence, on the Brandeis campus. However, it is not an immersion program like Middlebury's.

The idea moved forward as Middlebury's language philosophy coincided with Ringvald's.

"Besides being more marketable, having more cognitive abilities, [language gives you] access to knowledge of other cultures. The more I understand that language, I understand the culture. I don't need secondhand resources. I can go right to the language. We can be more educated about the other culture," Ringvald says.

Ringvald and the directors of the language schools met for the first time in 2006 and then opened the Brandeis Middlebury Hebrew School in 2008. In the program's inaugural year, it was small. There were 20 students.

"There was a sense of pioneering. We were trying to learn about the place," Ringvald notes.

The Brandeis Hebrew professors, leaders in the country for Hebrew education, had to readjust their teaching methods in the new environment.

"Don't forget we were all experienced teachers, but this was different. It was a lot of fun to adjust," Ringvald says.

Usually, during the semester, the professors would not teach entirely in Hebrew and taught shorter classes.

Since those first pioneering years, the program has grown to about 40 students every year, five teachers and one teaching assistant. The program has grown primarily by word of mouth due to its impressive results, according to Ringvald. This year, four Brandeis students, Yoni Dahlen (GRAD), Karen Schwerin (GRAD), Bella Shapiro (GRAD) and Abby Kulawitz '12, learned Hebrew alongside students from all over the country and some from abroad. Unlike many summer college programs, the intensive language school is not limited to only students and attracts people from all walks of life.

"[There was] one guy from the Navy and one from the Air Force. ... There was a 17 year old going to the [Israeli Defense Forces]; there was an Arab Islamic professor who was in his mid-40s. All religions, all walks of life, all ages," says Shapiro, who has just started at Brandeis this fall as a graduate student in the Hornstein Jewish Professional Program and also working on a graduate degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.

Before spending her summer on the beautiful Vermont campus, Shapiro had spent 10 months in Jerusalem.

"Amazingly enough, Middlebury is 10 times more of an immersion program than Israel. In Israel, I lived in Jerusalem, [and] everyone speaks English," she says.

Shapiro says that she could have a basic conversation in Hebrew during her time in Israel, but without signing an agreement to speak solely in Hebrew, she often fell back on English.

In the Middlebury program, every aspect of student life is in Hebrew. Students are in class for about five hours a day, but they are constantly practicing and learning. When students are not in class, they fill their time with extracurricular activities and sports like any college students. The only difference is that they are all in Hebrew.

"There are different activities you can participate in: dance, Israeli radio, sports. You can do fun stuff, [but] even when you're doing fun stuff, you're still learning," Shapiro says.

Shapiro was an avid fan of the language's sports teams, which competed against students in the other language schools. During the games, whether they were soccer, volleyball or any other sport, teams were allowed to have one bilingual on the team in order to communicate with the referees. Despite this, some things on the field were universally understood.

"Certain things were shared on the field like [profanities and hand gestures], but still you keep things in your language," Shapiro says.

Shapiro participated in Yoga with fellow Brandesian Kulawitz. Kulawitz, having spent the past 13 summers at her summer camp, felt like she had stopped progressing after her three semesters at Brandeis in Hebrew.

"I had heard of Middlebury and [the] timing made it possible to go this summer," Kulawitz says.

Before going to Middlebury, the American Studies and Sociology double major and NEJS minor ranked herself as a beginner at the language, who was able to read but could not speak a lot.

"Brandeis taught me a lot before I went, but I was still pretty beginning before I went," Kulawitz says.

Before the program, Kulawitz was in HBRW 34, Intermediate Hebrew II: Aspects of Israeli Culture. This semester, after completing the summer, she is in Hebrew 161, "What's up?: HBRW Through Israeli News Media."

"It was extremely difficult. We had to point to things a lot, act things out a lot. I really think it's the best way to learn a language," Kulawitz says.

A large part of what makes the program so worthwhile, according to its students, is the strong teaching staff.

Bonit Porath (NEJS), a Hebrew instructor from Brandeis, taught advanced students at the summer and claims that this program of immersion is the best way to learn a language.

"What we do in one day there is like one month at Brandeis. We can see the difference from the day to day. Improvement was incredible," Porath says.

Professors at the program live among the students and are encouraged to bring their families so that students can interact with native speakers of all ages. Ringvald, the program director, says this helps to create a close community.

"We lived in the same dorms [as the students]. All the teachers were on the second floor, but we shared a common area. You know them personally. It was nice," Porath says.

Each language school runs on a different schedule so as to prevent students studying different languages from socializing with each other, which might tempt them to speak English. Despite this, the Hebrew school held Shabbat dinners, which students from other schools often attended. Shapiro says the Hebrew students did not stray from their pledge, though.

"My friend spoke to someone in Hebrew; the other student spoke Hebrew, and they would respond in Spanish," Shapiro says.

Students in the school, even if starting from a beginning level, left the rugged campus with not only strong language skills but also a strong community.

"[It's a community]. The higher levels support the lower levels. It's a wonderful way of improving their language levels. At the end of the program, it feels like a family to us," Ringvald says.