Immerse or drown

Since a few of my friends are planning to retire soon to Latin America, I thought I’d write a few comments on what to expect and what I’ve learned about Spanish immersion programs.  What’s good and what’s not so good:

First, it’s going to be very hard to survive anywhere in Latin America without at least some basic Spanish. 
Guanajuato is a university town that has an exchange program with Ashland.  There are about 20,000 students here and all of them study English.  Having said that, you’ll almost never meet anyone who speaks English, and especially not in the places you could most use the help: stores, restaurants, pharmacies, etc.  Even more importantly, without a year or so of university-equivalent Spanish, it’s going to be that much harder to get started.  At my school, there have been to a number of students with no Spanish at all who take two or three weeks of classes then take off for several months or a year of travel in Latin America.

Good luck.

There are some negatives about the program that I’m in, common, I think to any program like this, and all of them structural.  You can start on any Monday and take as many or as few classes as you want, including private classes.  You can stay for only one week or as long as you want.  This is a great convenience, but it also makes good scheduling almost impossible for individual students.  The mix of students changes dramatically every week, and trying to get every student in the classes they want at the level they need is nearly impossible.  I didn’t want to take any grammar classes since I need practice in listening comprehension and speaking.  I can and do study grammar on my own, but much of it is more or less absorbed through the skin.  Still, most weeks I’ve had two of four classes in grammar, and again because students come and go, there’s no coherence in the classes.  One week we’ll study one topic, the next week another.  It’s only next week, my last of five, that I actually have the right mix of classes that I’ve wanted all along.

That being said, the staff is without exception excellent.  At least they understand the grammar they are teaching very well, and since all classes are conducted entirely in Spanish, it’s good practice just to be listening to the target language, even if I do feel that other classes would be more valuable.  Generally, I think I’ve made huge progress in listening comprehension and speaking, good progress in building vocabulary, and, ironically, probably little or no progress in grammar.  I still more or less guess when to use the preterit or imperfect past tenses, two tenses in Spanish when only one will do in English.  Ditto between the two forms of the very “to be,” where English gets by just fine thank you very much with one.  Don’t even ask me about the subjunctive, which is evil and put there only to discourage gringos from staying for more than about two weeks.

On the other hand, living in Mexico, you quickly have to learn all the other tenses to speak about the past, present and future, and then  the compound tenses, such as “if I had known blah blah blah, I would have blah, blah, blah.”  Or the almost impossible, “If I [future] blah, blah, blah, I will have blah, blah, blah.”  These don’t come readily when you need them, but in class where they are patient and wait for you to put a sentence together, you can puzzle it out.

Here, immersion means immersion.  I pass four hours a day in class entirely in Spanish, and during breaks the intermediate students like me try to stay in Spanish as well.  Living in a Spanish-speaking household, I start and end my day in Spanish.   There’s very little homework since most students are here both to study and to go out drinking, but I can spend as much time as I want studying on my own.  And I’ve found one of the best tools to be television.  I can almost completely understand some programs, such as those on NatGeo.  Last night I watched a program on modern ice breakers and had no problem understanding almost all of it.  Wow, who knew about ice breakers?  The narrators speak more slowly than normal and they’re trained to enunciate very clearly.  If only everyone would speak that way I’d be feeling pretty, pretty good (as Larry David says).

What I call street Spanish is a different story.  Outside of the classroom, people speak very fast, and in Mexico they use so many idiomatic expressions that even if you can distinguish individual words, you still won’t understand much of what they say.  As a simple example, “Es pan comida,” translates as “it’s eaten bread,” but idiomatically it means, “It’s easy.”  That one’s kind of obvious, which is the reason I understand it.  There are about a thousand more that are used every day that simply don’t translate at all.  I have a list of a few hundred in Spanish/English and English/Spanish, but they’re a lot harder to learn than simple vocabulary.

So in the end, there’s a lot of classroom and more formal Spanish I can understand quite well, but a lot more everyday Spanish that might as well be Greek. One guidebook I have suggests the only way you’ll ever learn real Spanish is to get a Mexican girlfriend or boyfriend.  That not being an option for me, watching soap operas or movies at least helps me to process what I hear much faster than I would otherwise.  Unfortunately, most movies and all soap operas suck, so I can only stay with it for an hour or so.   

Also:  Mexican Spanish is what we learn in school and I’m guessing what is taught in programs such as Rosetta Stone, but the language varies a great deal from region to region, even in the same country.  Columbian Spanish, for example, just drops many syllables, and you have to have a pretty good ear to catch what’s being said.   Still, with a little practice you can pick it up, and if you can say it in Mexican Spanish, they can understand you in any region.

Finally, this is a very inexpensive way to travel and study.  My classes are about $120 a week, and my homestay is $27 a day including meals, although I still eat many of my meals in town.  If I do it again, I might take a room in a hostel just for the little bit of added privacy.  I’m not sure I gain much from the simple conversations I have in the home, but most if not all schools can place you in a hostel of some kind for a comparable price.  The school I’m attending has a very nice hostel with private rooms and baths, and I’d be very happy to stay there.  It’s also close to El Centro, as opposed to the long walk downtown from where I live and the punishing walk back up the hill.  Since I’ve been fairly sick with a bad cold almost the whole time I’ve been here, I always take a cab back.  There’s also a bus which only costs five pesos, about four cents, but I haven’t quite had the nerve to try it yet.  I worry that if I get on the wrong bus—easy to do—I might have a hard time finding my way back, and the cab ride is only about $2.50.

So, bottomlinewise, this is a great way to travel and a real jump start for anyone wanting to improve language skills rapidly.  If I could stay a year, I think I’d be approaching a level of proficiency if not fluency, but that’s way beyond my budget and way more time than I’d choose to stay away from Mary and home.  Too bad, because this is a great adventure and a wonderful experience.  If I were planning to actually to move to Latin America, I’d definitely start it out this way.  At the end of five weeks, you’ll be a lot more competent in the language and definitely know if this is a place you actually want to live. 

........ 

Today is the last day of Festival Cervantino, and I’ll be glad when everybody goes home.  I’ve been to several excellent concerts, all but one free, but last night was the traditional every-kid-from-Mexico-City-comes-to-Guanajuato-with-a-sleeping-bag-and-a-lot-of tequila end of the festival, and the streets were una locura.  I went downtown to eat and quickly turned back to a Swedish restaurant that serves good meatballs and is almost always empty.  It’s a refuge when I don’t want to be in Mexico anymore, which happens from time to time. 

Then I went home and watched some soap operas.