The Other Side of the Table - Spanish Immersion Classes

After several years tutoring immigrants at the ESL Café, my husband and I got a taste of my own medicine at La Escuela Intercultura www.interculturacostarica.com in Heredia, Costa Rica by taking Spanish immersion classes.

Besides being in class for four hours a day, the school can arrange homestays where students live with a family, eating breakfast and dinner with them. We were thrilled to do the homestay figuring it would be a good opportunity to practice speaking Spanish. For years, I would tell students, “You only speak to me an hour per week. You need to practice more. Watch English speaking TV. Talk to English Speakers. Go on www.mylanguageexchange.com and find a skype partner. The more you practice, the better you’ll get.”

At Intercultura, we had to do just that - in Spanish. Herediais an older colonial era town of about 250,000 people with a large branch of the University of Costa Rica. Since it isn’t a tourist town, the people there don’t practice speaking English very often and seem self-conscious when they do. Almost everyone in the town was very patient with us, conversing with us in our inadequate Spanish.

main plaza in Heredia

While there are many language schools for adults in Costa Rica, La Escuela Intercultura is probably one of the best. We were placed in an intermediate Spanish class with four other students. Our Spanish teacher was excellent constantly changing our activity using every learning method so that the lesson would sink into our older brains. The four hours each day flew by.

In addition to Spanish classes, the school has various cultural activities – tours of Heredia, dance classes, Costa Rican cooking classes. Our favorite was the language exchange. Besides providing Spanish classes, Intercultura provides English classes to the locals. Twice a week we had an opportunity to speak with these students - half an hour in English and half an hour in Spanish. Most of the Costa Rican students were university students and we worried about how interested they’d be in talking to older retired Americans. This worry was totally unfounded. They were very cordial and eager to talk to us, interested in talking to us intent upon hearing everything we had to say about our attitudes on a variety of subjects.

The family we stayed with was very encouraging and spoke to us extensively about Costa Rican life. We arrived at their house on their Election Day. On a walk through their town, they took us to their polling place. The whole town was celebrating as they got out to vote. This was such a contrast to elections in the United States that it was a pleasure to witness. The man of the family was very involved in the campaign. We watched the election returns on TV with him as he talked to us about it throughout the evening. Unfortunately, we only understood about 30% of what he said. This was frustrating to me. I would have loved to have a real discussion with him about the issues facing Costa Rica. By the time we left their house, however, we understood about 60%.

Did we become fluent Spanish speakers? Of course not. Who can become fluent in any language in a couple of weeks? Nevertheless, thanks to Intercultura, we speak Spanish much better than we did before. It was a great experience and I recommend it to anyone who would be able to go there.