‘Homestays’ can be very beneficial for students. They give the student the opportunity to interact and communicate with native Spanish speaking people in a completely natural environment. It provides a continuous forum in which to practice speaking Spanish and to practice listening to it. Not only this but it gives the student great insight into local culture and ways of life.

From my own experiences I would highly recommend ‘homestays’. I stayed with a local family in Antigua, Guatemala for two weeks whilst studying at a local school. I had my own room and was made to feel like one of the family for my entire stay. One of the best things for me was that nobody in the family could speak a word of English. I was forced into speaking Spanish all the time. Back then my level of Spanish wasn’t great but I still managed to communicate well enough.

Being forced into a situation where you have to communicate in only Spanish can act as a stimulus to the entire learning process. The desire to be understood encourages learning!

The family I stayed with were very accommodating and were more than happy to converse with me and include me in the normal family activities of the normal day. I would sit down with the family at breakfast, lunch and dinner and would often sit around the table in the evening talking or simply watching TV.

One of the benefits of combining Spanish classes with a ‘homestay’ is that you can practice or test out the things you might have learnt during that day with the family you are staying with. I would deliberately try to include new words, or specific bits of Spanish grammar into conversations I was having with the family. Often they would correct me or suggest other ways of saying what I was trying to get across to them.

Living with a native Spanish speaking family gives the student great exposure to the Spanish language as it is spoken in that particular region of the world. I have said many times before in previous articles that the more listening practice that the student can get the better. The act of listening intently for long periods of time can actually be quite gruelling but the more you do it, the easier it will become. Your brain will slowly but surely become accustomed to hearing and interpreting Spanish sounds. I talk much more about listening techniques in a later lesson.

Being in a family environment also gives the student exposure that is completely natural. Conversations that are had around the breakfast table for example are those that any family might have and are therefore completely relevant. The conversations you might have in any one typical day could probably fill an entire textbook of made up role-play exercises. The day will be crammed with continual practice and the best thing is that it wont even feel like studying!

The size of the family you decide to live with will also dictate to some extent the types of conversations you might have. It is a good idea to immerse yourself in a larger family unit if possible and one that has children. The more people you can talk to the better. I remember one afternoon sitting down with the 9 year old daughter of the family I stayed with watching ‘Scooby Doo’ on the TV in Spanish. I had a lengthy conversation as best as I could with her about cartoons and which ones were my favourites and why. It isn’t often you would get to talk about something like that!

Because my ‘homestay’ family included me in pretty much everything they did they also invited me on a night out. It was the mother’s birthday and we celebrated it by first having a traditional meal at home and then going to some bars and finally a club. It was a great experience and a lot of fun. Although I didn’t really think about it at the time it was another example of a completely natural situation where I could practice speaking Spanish.

After the two weeks were up I really felt that I had bonded with my family and I know I my Spanish benefited from it enormously. I felt more confident when speaking to people from then on and the combination of lessons and family living really helped to improve my overall level of Spanish. It really was a great adventure and an entirely worthy experience in every way. If you are looking for a complete cultural immersion experience then I would highly recommend a ‘homestay’.

In this article I have said how important it is to practice listening to spoken Spanish. The more listening you do the better. Joining a ‘homestay’ program is certainly one way in which you can achieve this. In my next article I discuss in more detail different listening techniques and how you can benefit from them.

During my two weeks at the school I spent Monday to Friday from 9.00am to 12.00pm studying Spanish grammar on a one to one basis with my tutor. The afternoons were devoted to different kinds of conversational lessons. These included talking in Spanish with various different tutors on a one to one basis, participating in group conversations and playing different types of word games.

Conversational lessons benefit the student in a number of different ways. In my case having conversational lessons each afternoon gave me the opportunity to put into practice the Spanish grammar that I had learnt during that morning. It is always a good thing to try and practice any new Spanish you have learnt, straight away while it is still fresh in your head. You might want to think about constructing certain types of typical sentences that help you remember different aspects of Spanish grammar better.

Speaking, listening and becoming accustomed to spoken Spanish is an essential part of the learning process and of course, having a conversation with someone allows you to do all of these things at the same time.

When you first start to have conversations with people in Spanish you will probably find the whole experience quite gruelling, especially if your vocabulary is limited! This is completely normal. Don’t forget that you are used to speaking in your first language every single day without even thinking about it and to suddenly change this habitual action is no easy task! The thing is that you have to keep practicing. It is like anything, the more you practice the better you become.

One of the great benefits of having conversational lessons is that you can take as long as is required to have the actual conversation, plus, your teacher can make sure you are speaking correctly. In real life situations this is often very difficult if not impossible to achieve. Often people will not have the patience to wait while you try to get your words out or not bother to correct you if you say something that isn’t quite grammatically correct.

The types of conversations that you can have in order to practice your Spanish are endless, which means you can practice using all aspects of Spanish grammar and a full range of vocabulary. To practice different verb tenses for example you can talk about things in the present, past and future or you could practice describing what certain objects look like if you just want to focus on specific vocabulary.

You can talk about yourself, you can talk about events in your life, you can practice describing things, asking and responding to different types of questions, you can talk about different experiences you have had, about things you would like to do, about the things you do and don’t like. The list really is endless!

When I was attending conversational classes in Guatemala I did however, sometimes get a little board and frustrated. I think this was mainly because I couldn’t speak quickly enough, didn’t know enough vocabulary and always had to think about what I was going to say before saying it. Also I was having the same types of conversations over and over again and couldn’t really talk about anything in great detail. In order to prevent or lessen these types of annoyances the school provided group conversational lessons and encouraged the students to play different types of word games such as ‘hang man’ or ‘what am I’.

There is no point in doing any kind of study if you are not enjoying it or if you start becoming board. Varying the different types of learning activities is a good way of preventing this from happening. Playing word games are also a good way of breaking up your study routine but in a way that still allows you to practice your Spanish. Group conversations can help build your speaking confidence and listening to other students speaking Spanish can be quite reassuring. You realise that other people are in the same boat as you and you can also use the experience to test whether you think someone has said something correctly or not.

Making the learning experience an enjoyable one is important and to help achieve this the school I went to in Guatemala arranged different group activities after lessons. Some of these included visiting a local coffee plantation, going on a bike ride and going out for a meal. Getting involved in social activities is not only fun but it also allows you to practice your Spanish in less formal and natural environments.

In my next article I intend to write about ‘home stays’. When I was studying at a school in Antigua, Guatemala the school arranged for me to live with a local family for two weeks. I will discuss in what ways this type of culture immersion helped me to learn more Spanish and practice the Spanish I already knew.

In this article I want to talk about the benefits of learning Spanish through direct exposure with native Spanish speaking people. If you had to, you could probably learn the Spanish language without ever picking up a Spanish textbook! It might take a very very long time but eventually through direct contact and social interaction with other people who already speak the language it could be done. The basic human desire to communicate would prevail.

Learning Spanish through mimicking how someone else speaks the language will mean that you end up speaking Spanish in exactly the same way as they do! On the whole this might not be a bad thing but you don’t want to pick up any bad language habits or speak in an incomprehensible accent. On the other hand you do want, to be able to understand what native Spanish speaking people are saying and you also want them, to be able to understand what you are saying! In this sense a little bit of mimicking is probably a good thing.

Not being understood is a common frustration that many students suffer when trying to communicate with native speakers of Spanish. A lot of the time the Spanish spoken may be 100% grammatically correct and yet people still do not seem to understand it. This may be because the Spanish is spoken in an accent that is completely foreign!

Trying to communicate to a native speaker of Spanish, wherever it might be in the world makes you realise just how important pronunciation is! Not only do you need to know new Spanish words, you must also make sure that you know how to pronounce them correctly. I mentioned in one of my early articles how important it is to routinely do this early on in your studies. Of course if you are in another country and people don’t understand you, this will force you, and therefore train you, to speak clearly and correctly right from the start!

As I travelled through Mexico I really tried to speak to as many locals as I possibly could. Don’t shy away from communication in Spanish just because you know it is going to be a struggle. The more practical experience you can gain from both speaking and listening the better.

My early conversations with people were only very basic ones. Mainly because if I attempted to show someone that my level of Spanish was better then it really was then I knew I would be shooting myself in the foot. If people think you can communicate well, then they are far less likely to make an effort to speak slowly and clearly. In the beginning this is exactly what you need people to do!

Typical conversations that I would have with people were mostly about asking for things in a shop or restaurant, asking for directions to a place I wanted to visit or talking about journeys. Immersing myself in the country I was in meant I had to talk about these things just to survive. They were also the types of conversations that were short and not very complicated! I would prepare myself for the entire experience before hand. I knew exactly what I was going to say before saying it and I knew what types of answers I was likely to get from people.

A lot of the time I would deliberately ask people questions that I already knew the answers to, just to see if they would understand what I was saying and whether or not they would give me the answer that I was expecting. I would also ask the same question to lots of different people to see if they would reply in the same way. Then I would try and get the same information out of other people but I asking the same question in a slightly different way. The great thing about asking different types of questions is that you only have to alter them slightly to be able to adapt them to another completely different type of situation.

A lot of the time I didn’t understand the answers to many of my questions but at least this gave me the opportunity to ask the person I was speaking to, to repeat what they had said. Even if I had understood what someone had said I would sometimes deliberately ask him or her to repeat it just for practice!

This type of practical exposure is a great way of getting yourself started. It not only gives you first hand practical speaking and listening experience but it also builds your confidence in preparation for more complicated conversations that you will have as time progresses. Exposing yourself to native Spanish speakers is also great because it shows you that the Spanish you are learning actually works. You can use it and people understand it. This acts as a great confidence booster and gives you added incentive to improve and better yourself.

In total I spent about a month in Mexico and after a while I was able to have very basic conversations with people. A lot of what I said to people was in broken Spanish however. At this point I wasn’t really able to structure my sentences properly and I knew that I was saying things that were grammatically incorrect. One of my biggest problems was that I was trying to structure sentences in the same way that I would have structured them in English and a lot of the time it simply didn’t work!

It was at this point that I decided it was time to get back to some serious studying. I needed to learn more about Spanish grammar. Being able to communicate in broken Spanish was a good start but I wanted to do much better! In my next article I want to talk about some of my experiences at a Spanish language school I went to in Antigua, Guatemala.

I actually started my trip through the Americas in the U.S. I spent some time in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego before heading south to the Mexican border on route to Tiajana. Although I didn’t actually converse with anybody in Spanish in the U.S I did learn a lot about the Spanish conquest of this region before the English took over!

You might be wondering what that has to do with learning Spanish! Well, the point is that learning Spanish shouldn’t just be about learning how to communicate in Spanish. One of the best ways to keep yourself enthused about your studies is to immerse yourself in all things Spanish. Learning about Spanish history for example and in my particular case about the Spanish conquest of the Americas is a great way of adding substance. It kind of validates and gives purpose and added reason to why you are learning the Spanish language in the first place.

This might all sound a bit deep but the truth is that cultural immersion really can help you to understand certain things about the Spanish language that you might not be able to gain from a textbook alone! Plus, if your anything like me you’ll simply love learning about Spanish history and the conquest of the Americas as a matter course.

Before I went to the U.S I didn’t realise just how much of the Americas that the Spanish were originally in control of. Their rule extended the entire Pacific coast from Southern Argentina right the way up to modern day Alaska. I also didn’t realise that the names of some US cities are actually Spanish names! San Francisco (Saint Francis) Los Angeles (The Angles).

The further south that you go in the U.S the more Spanish influence there is. In Florida and L.A, Spanish place names are common and some road signs are even translated into Spanish.

So, with a little Pre-Columbian history under my belt and my self study crash course in Spanish I caught a bus south from L.A direct to the Mexican town of Tijuana just over the U.S / Mexican border. To start with I didn’t really get much of a chance to test my Spanish out on anyone. The taxi drivers, the owner of the hostel I stayed at and the bar staff at all the bars I went to all seemed to want to talk to me in English! This wasn’t that surprising however! Tijuana has a reputation for being a bit of a party town for young North Americans looking for a good weekend!

I tried to speak a little Spanish to the locals but couldn’t string sentences together quick enough. I think most people could see I was struggling and decided to make it easy for the ‘poor gringo’ by speaking to me in English! It wasn’t until I decided to head south again further into Baja de California that I got my first real opportunities to speak.

I went to a local bus company to book a bus to the next town south, called Ensenada. This time I was on my own; no-body spoke a word of English. I then attempted to explain to the lovely young Mexican girl that attended me that I wanted to catch a bus to the next town south. The only thing was I didn’t know how to say it properly. I didn’t know the word for ‘catch’ or ‘get on’ and had forgotten even basic words like ‘to go’ and ‘ticket’. All I kept blurting out was ‘ummm…..bus…..ummm…bus….. Ensenada!’ I must have looked like a bumbling fool and I certainly felt like one!

Of course the lovely young Mexican girl understood that I wanted to go to Ensenada by bus, even from my mumblings, but the next challenge was figuring out the bus timetable and how much it was going to cost me. If this wasn’t bad enough I couldn’t understand a word of what the Mexican girl was saying to me in Spanish! In the end the Mexican girl had to write numbers down on a piece of paper (thank god numbers are the same in both English and Spanish I thought!) After a period of time, which seemed like forever I eventually paid my pesos and reserved a seat on the next bus out, which was in a few hours!

Admittedly I had only just arrived in the Spanish-speaking world and I hadn’t really done a lot of studying so I probably shouldn’t have expected much! Later I was told that the Mexican accent could be one of the hardest in Latin America to understand as well. But, the thing was, I was pretty annoyed and shocked at just how useless I was! So from that day onwards I promised myself that I would find a little time each day during the rest of my travels, (not difficult as a backpacker), to improve my Spanish skills. I knew I had a long way to go but I was determined to do it!

For the most part the Spanish language is highly ordered. You can pretty much dissect any Spanish sentence and understand why it has been constructed in the way that it has, simply by learning some fundamental concepts about Spanish grammar. Once you understand those concepts you can use them to formulate other sentences.

My intention here is not to discuss in any great detail the workings of any particular aspect of Spanish grammar but rather to indicate those elements of Spanish grammar that are pretty much essential if you want to gain a good understanding of how the Spanish language works. Below I have divided these elements into four categories.

Spanish verb formations – Different tenses.
Gender – Forming masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives. Verbs and gender.
Types of words – Using prepositions / conjunctions / adverbs etc.
Sentence formation – How different words fit together in a sentence.

All of the above elements of Spanish grammar were included in the basic level Spanish textbook that I used when I first started to learn Spanish and in every other textbook that I have seen since.

I mentioned in my last article that you will want to buy a Spanish verb conjugation book in order to learn how Spanish verbs are formed. Not only can you use these books to understand and learn how different verbs should be formed in different tenses but you can also use them to learn which verbs fall into different formation categories. You can instantly tell for example if a new verb you have learnt is regular or irregular.

Verb conjugation books provide a constant reference. Every time you learn a new verb in Spanish how will you know how that verb should be formed in different tenses? You will have to refer to a verb conjugation book. Although you can often guess how a verb should be formed by looking at how it is spelt and whether it ends in AR, ER, or IR you can never really be sure.

Even when you have learnt how different verbs are formed in some of the most commonly used verb tenses you still may have to refer to a verb conjugation book to see how that verb is formed in a tense that is used in speech far less often!

Even when you are highly proficient in Spanish it is still quite likely that you will have to refer to a verb conjugation book from time to time. Even native Spanish speaking people have to use them occasionally! The truth is that there are thousands of different verbs that can be formed in so many different ways that it would be almost impossible to know and memorise how every verb should be formed and used in all types of situations!

A good start for anyone learning Spanish verbs would be to concentrate on commonly used verbs. Look around you and think about different types of everyday situations where you need to use a verb in order to communicate. Very quickly you will have a list of several hundred everyday verbs. Once you have done this you then need to learn which ones are regular and which are irregular. You can use your verb conjugation book to do this.

Before I embarked on my trip to Central and South America I did buy myself a Spanish verb conjugation book. However, after travelling for a while I ended up buying another one. This is because the first one I bought didn’t include all possible verb tenses, probably because some verb tenses in Spanish are rarely used. There is for example two different ways that the past subjunctive tense can be formed in Spanish. Some verb conjugation books might not show both methods of formation and some don’t even show the past subjunctive tense at all!

So, when buying a verb conjugation book be sure to check that it includes everything you need to know. If you don’t know exactly what to check for take a look at the verb tables on Spanishexperto.com. These tables contain all the different verb tenses that you will ever come across when learning Spanish.

So far in this series of articles I have talked about some of the things you might want to think about before starting to learn Spanish, such as mental preparation. I have also touched on different learning techniques and have pointed out some of the areas of study that you will inevitably engage yourself in if you are serious about learning Spanish.

I have also barked on about my basic level Spanish textbook that I studied before my trip to Central and South America. After finishing this basic level textbook and arming myself with a fair selection of different Spanish words I thought I was ready to take on the Spanish language for real. I couldn’t have been more wrong! In my next article I intend to talk about what happened to me when I first tried to communicate with the native Spanish-speaking people of Tijuana in Mexico.

* Co-Workers – Friends – Family

If you are fortunate enough to have people around you who speak the language, spend as much time as you can with them. Be forewarned, though. Daily conversation with friends and relatives will probably be filled with idioms and grammar that would make your foreign language teacher nauseous.

* Internet Broadcasting

There are many free internet radio stations. They broadcast day and night, 7 days a week. All you have to do is find them. Try internet searches like the following in your favorite search engine:

- free internet radio German

- free internet radio Norwegian

- free internet radio French

- internet radio stations Spanish

- internet radio stations Portuguese

Disc jockeys and talk show hosts may not use perfect grammar. However, news broadcasts are usually correct.

* Books on Tape or CD

You can purchase audio books online at sites like Amazon.

Unfortunately, not all audio books are created equal. Sometimes the narration is cluttered with distracting loud sound effects and music. The volume may vary from horrendously loud to whisper-soft. If you can listen to a sample before purchase, do so. Never purchase more than one audio book from the same publisher or narrator until you are sure that they produce acceptable recordings. Sometimes the narrator’s volume will vary so much during a reading that it makes the book almost useless.

Be on the lookout for audio bundles that include a printed copy of the book – excellent for learning purposes!

* TV Channels

Check your cable or satellite TV lineup. You may find one or more channels in the language you are trying to learn.

* Movies and Television Series on DVD

Most larger centers and internet sites like Amazon have foreign language productions with English sound tracks and subtitles. Try to watch everything at least once without subtitles. Pay attention to the lips of the speakers as they pronounce words. Lipreading is part of the language learning process.

If you prefer to buy English productions that have been remastered for foreign language markets, you will lose the lipreading advantage – and you may have to purchase or hack a DVD player so that it will play DVDs from other regions. There is a link at the bottom of this article that goes to a page with more specific information.

North American TV series like M*A*S*H and Golden Girls have 1/2-hour episodes. Omit the intro and closing credits and you are left with about 20 minutes of material. Try to learn a few new words of vocabulary each time you watch an episode.

* What are You Waiting For?

Take advantage of all the opportunities that technology has to offer!